Part 1: Guide to Riding a Bike in The City.
Anybody with a passing familiarity with me and my life knows I’m a huge proponent of being stubborn, pigheaded, and wrong as often as possible. I love it. It makes my life so easy.
Do you want your life to be easy? All you have to do is constantly interrupt everybody who speaks to you and relate either a boring irrelevant anecdote that takes too long or a totally uninformed half-cocked opinion about something. Keep this up for long enough and eventually people will leave you alone. Easy.
I was reading about Ronald Reagan today, and that’s pretty much what he did, and now everybody’s in agreement that he was some kind of genius. I don’t know a bunch about the guy, but based on my aforementioned proclivity for ignorant defiance of good sense, I will tell you all about my opinions of him anyway. I think he was not a genius. But I do think he was America’s greatest Presidential douchebag. He really did very little that he didn’t feel like doing. That whole grandfatherly “I can’t hear your probative questions about urban decay and the widening class gap because I’m an old man and I’m standing near a helicopter” act he ran with the press? That was great douchebag stuff. That’s as great of a trick as pretending you left your wallet in the car to either A. ensure that you’ll get a couple of free drinks out of your boss, or B. escape from having a few drinks with your boss, depending on what you’d prefer. It’s the same scam, but when you’re President you get to use a real helicopter instead of a pretend wallet.
This is not, coming from me, damning praise. It’s just regular praise. He gets credit both for doing the things he did (great warrior who put America’s defense first, assuring that the American economy is based on the principles of free market) AND doing the opposite of the things he did (reducing the size of government--even though he increased defense spending a bajillion times, created a huge budget deficit, bailed out Chrysler, was forced to spend billions to correct the problems spurred on by the collapse of the Savings and Loan industry that he deregulated). What a fantastic douchebag. That dude was Teflon.
You see?
I just told you about Ronald Reagan for two whole paragraphs, and really the only basis I had for my opinions were a couple of articles in Slate.com and Vanity Fair that I read today, plus a few other pieces of flotsam I have floating around in my brain, probably from my childhood, which heavily involved my mother screaming about Republicans.
You’re probably not even reading anymore, which is great for me because I need internet computer friends even less than I need regular friends (which is to say some, sometimes). You see how easy my life is? People tend to leave me alone because I am annoying and I say things about Reagan that are probably wrong. And what’s worse, I don’t even care that I’m wrong. I even kind of like it. How do you deal with a person like that?
And my opinions about Reagan are almost totally off the cuff. Imagine how idiotic I could sound if I really thought about what I was saying. I could invent crackpot theories about a couple of specific real-life situations that sound convincing while being totally wrong and even dangerous. In fact, I already have. I bet you can’t wait to hear about them, either. I’ll buy you a drink. Nevermind your wallet. Your wallet can wait.
Guide to Riding a Bike in The City.
If, like me, you live in a city and are a broke loser who insists on keeping his options for future failure open by never fully committing to anything, jobwise or anythingelsewise, you’ve probably realized by now that a bicycle is the best way to get around. It’s pretty much free except for occasional incredibly inconvenient but cheap maintenance, you never have to look for parking, and you don’t have to waste extra money on a gym membership if it’s your only means of conveyance. Often it’s the fastest way to get somewhere, too, depending on how good you are at planning your day and/or how sweaty you’d prefer to be when you arrive.
Oh, I should mention that this Guide does not apply to Los Angeles. But if you live in Los Angeles, you’re probably not reading this because you can’t read.
(Don’t tell anybody in Los Angeles I that I said they can’t read. On the off chance they ask about it, just tell them I’m still talking about Ronald Reagan and that my ideas so far are not “pitchable” or “zazzy” enough. This will work because everybody in Los Angeles is involved in the entertainment industry. Close one, everybody.)
((I’m kidding. Of course Los Angeles residents can read. That was just another of my wrongheaded theories come to life. Another quick one: Leprosy is no big deal.))
Back to bike riding:
People worry about how safe it is to ride your bike around in a city. They’re right to. It is unsafe. No amount of safety gear or precautionary maneuvering can possibly save you from meeting your imminent demise. If you ride a bike in the city, you will be crushed by a bread truck. Immediately. Within minutes. I recommend not doing it ever.
This is not true, but being a city bike rider I prefer to weed out any potential weenies out there who don’t do anything but get in my way. As far as riding your bike goes, how safe you are is in direct proportion to how much you’re probably in my way. Evidence of such safety-seeking and hence inconvenient behavior include: excessive reflective tape, visible coloring on clothing and accessories, sufficient lighting, upright bicycles that allow for correct posture, rearview mirrors on handlebars or helmets, helmets, stopping for any reason (even a good one), slowing down while negotiating hairpin turns, and not charging blindly at full speed into vanishing narrow spaces between merging dump trucks. These are all a huge pain in my ass.
Of course I have a theory to justify the monumental amount of disappointment I feel whenever these safe behaviors are observed. It is a stupid theory and it could very well get me killed one day. I suggest you follow it.
Here goes:
1. Your number one bike-riding-in-the-city danger is invisibility. You can correct this by wearing a gigantic fluorescent green parka and stopping at every stop sign and jingling a little bike bell like some jolly sidekick from a creepy 70’s children’s show, which is dangerous because it will make motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians want to hit you. Or you can embrace your invisibility and just behave accordingly.
Just ride like nobody can see you. When you roll through a stop sign, swerve behind the car to your right that has the right of way. And if you're in a position where you need somebody to see you, do something highly visible and aggressive, like swerve in front of them in an obvious way that makes them freak out a little bit. It’s actually more safe than cautiously puttering your way down the bike lane in a hazmat suit, because people will be more likely to get into accidents while they’re distantly distracted by something imperceptibly annoying in their peripheral vision (such as you in a hazmat suit) than they will be when they’re stopping short and yelling, “WHOA DUDE LOOK AT THIS FAST-RIDING BADASS WHO CAME FROM SEEMINGLY OUT OF NOWHERE AND CUT ME OFF SO HE COULD SWERVE AROUND THIS CONSTRUCTION CREW AND TURN RIGHT WHILE DIPPING UNDER THE BACKHOE AT 30 MPH!”
The second option seems more dangerous, but at least it involves a motorist who's hitting the brakes. I guess the point here is: it's better to deal with a guy who sees you than a guy who doesn’t, regardless of where they’re coming from or where they’re going. That means don’t worry about swerving into oncoming traffic if that oncoming traffic sees you and is worried about the possibility of you swerving into it. When in doubt, make them see you.
2. Lodged in the subtext here is a secret to bike riding invisibility: the faster you’re going, the less visible you’ll be until you're right in front of somebody's face. This is fine, since you're assuming that nobody can see you anyway. So if you want to get where you’re going in a timely manner, you might as well go fast and deal with being be a little more invisible. You can only go the supersafe route if you’re planning on riding like a la-di-dah millionaire with nowhere pressing to be or a weekend bikeriding tourist who just thinks it’s nice outside. And that’s not going to work if you’re supposed to be at dude’s house in like ten minutes or else you won’t get that free weed he promised, and then after that you’ve got to go pick up a teapot for your girlfriends’ parents, and you don’t want to be late or else you’ll have to lie to your girlfriend about the teapot being on backorder (she will see through this obvious lie) instead of just having the free weed and the teapot being on time.
3. Pretend everybody is a jerk that wants to do the wrong thing all the time. It’s a little bit tricky to picture, but when you’re out riding, pretend that every car on the road can’t wait to come senselessly careening towards you to end your life like there’s a billion dollar prize on your head. If this situation sounds daunting to you rather than a fun hypothetical that you’d enjoy pretending that you’re escaping from every time you go to the grocery store, then maybe city bike riding isn’t for you.
You should be as aware as humanly possible of what could happen. After a while you’ll start to trust things a little more, because cars have a kind of hidden body language where you know they’re going to turn even if there’s no turn signal or brake lights, and you’ll be like, “That dude wants to spill my face skin all over his hood in about two seconds,” and you’ll avoid that. For a while you’re going to be wrong a lot about whether or not a dude wants to spill your face skin, but it’s a good way to think.
4. There are two kinds of rules: the fake ones from the book about “No Turn On Red” and “don’t cut through that gas station” and “yield to pedestrians in crosswalk,” and there’s the real ones from “the street” and from common sense inside of yourself, like “Always Turn On Red, Right Or Left Or Even Straight If Nobody’s Coming,” and “cut through that gas station, onto the sidewalk for ten feet, and around the back of the Meineke into the alley if it gets you there faster, who gives a fuck?” and “you can slap a pedestrian in the face as you ride by if he’s being a drunk idiot.”
People who complain about how nobody pays attention to the book rules are pansies who don’t know how to have fun. And ten bucks says they’re driving over the speed limit, so they’re also hypocrites. You’re on a bike. It’s your job to look out for yourself. The cops aren’t out there protecting you, and if you’re the one out of line, they probably aren’t even going to pull you over. If they do it’s fine because you can still ride a bike even without a license. Don’t tell them that, though. Be respectful. Also don’t mention how drunk you are.
5. It’s ok to be a little drunk and/or high and/or listen to your iPod. Not when you’re downtown in the middle of rush hour, but in general, it’s ok because you’re not going to kill anybody but yourself. Stick to side streets. And go for a train or bus/bike combo or couch crash scenario if you’re too far gone. For me, too far gone means either “already puked” or “it’s too far and I just don’t feel like it.” I’m getting less heroic as I get older, and it’s not a bad thing. The more you ride your bike, the more you can save up for emergency cab rides.
Could following these rules end your life? Yes. Yes it could. But: so could crossing the street. You never know. And alsobut: these are just theories and guidelines I’ve come up with for myself. They are probably dangerous and they are probably wrong, and I'm fine with that, and I’m just getting warmed up. "Sometimes it's a good idea to pedal really fast into oncoming traffic" is not even the most dangerous general-life theory I have. I’ll go over that one in Part 2, but for now let’s get some more quick idiot theories out of the way:
- It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, just put your regular sized toothpaste in your pocket and walk through airport security anyway. Even if they stop you for it, they probably won’t strip search you, and once they check it to see that it’s toothpaste, you’ll probably get to keep it. That “3.2oz or less” rule is to keep them from “having to check each individual substance.” Really it’s a conspiracy by the toiletries industry. Gillette is in bed with the TSA, and they bought that provision into the Patriot Act to force everybody to buy tiny cans of shaving cream. It’s not a security risk. Nobody’s going to make a shaving cream bomb in the bathroom during a flight, and if they do, it’s going to be another “Let’s Roll” situation (except without the secret F-14s gunning you down) before they even make it to the cockpit. Don’t fall for it. Put the toothpaste in your pocket. You won’t get caught. And if you do, who cares if you’re holding up the line? You don’t. You’re at the front of it already.
- If you don’t have much money for food and you’re in a hurry, go to Subway and get a sandwich with as many condiments on it as possible. It’s like extra nutrients for free.
- Do not worry about that parking ticket you got on an out-of-state rental car two weeks before leaving the country for a six month span. It will not bite you in the ass.
…Part 2 soon.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Monday, February 16, 2009
Guide to Having Sex on Everybody’s Coats.
College is a very stupid time for a human being to be alive. A very stupid time. This is why people always bore you with “college” stories. This is why I always bore you with college stories. College kids are stupid. You make stupid choices and everything seems like it’s important at the time when it’s happening, so it seems like it’s a good story when it’s really not a good story.
Like, “One time me and my buddies got really bored and we drove out into a hayfield with a pony keg and started this huge bonfire, but this guy got mad and shot at us with a shotgun, and we had to sleep in the woods because our one buddy freaked out and left us out there, but really it wasn’t even a farmer, it was just this one dude’s buddy and the two of them just stole our beer for a party they were having.”
Maybe that’s a good story, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. Nobody really comes out ahead in it. I do know that. You’re either bragging about being duped, or you’re bragging about how you duped somebody, and either way you’re bragging about how important beer was to you and how funny it is to steal the car of and/or have your car stolen by somebody you kind of know. It’s really a lose lose lose lose scenario. Full of stupidity.
I have college stories of my own, and they suck just as much as that one, and they’re full of just as much of the central controlling theme in all college stories as that one in the hayfield I just made up (it probably really happened like 470 times), namely: we were young and stupid and we did something stupid that we wouldn’t do now, but wasn’t it great that we were that young and that stupid at one point in our lives?
Well, yes and no. Yes it’s great to be young and stupid. No, it’s not great that you’re not that stupid anymore. You can and should be just as stupid now as you were in college. I am. I do stupid things all the time. Yesterday I played Dynasty Warriors 6 for ten straight hours. It was very stupid. By the time I was done, my eyeballs felt like they’d been licked by a dehydrated house cat, and I was seeing little life meters above strangers’ heads. But that’s not adequate to report to anybody as if it’s a story. It’s just a stupid thing I did.
It’s not even the stupidest thing I’ve done in the last 48 hours, either. That would have to be not doing laundry. I have continued to not do laundry for a very long time now, and it’s stupid. I’m down to the comparative-smelling phase of getting myself dressed in the morning. Why didn’t I do laundry? Because I had ten consecutive hours of Dynasty Warriors 6 to play. That’s why.
One time in college I had sex in the coat room of a party on top of everybody’s coats.
I had no idea it was going to be sex until it was sex, though. So it’s not like I walked into the coat room and said, “Hey baby, let’s do it on these coats.” But after a little while of making out that’s exactly what ended up happening on those coats. When you’re in college, that’s how sex works sometimes. If you’re good at making out, sometimes it just turns into sex kind of by accident. Kissing and having sex are two points on the same continuum, and nobody’s discovered the rules of where one should turn into another because everybody’s only had sex like 4 times ever. So it’s possible and even vaguely likely that you could accidentally have sex on everybody’s coats.
At one point we had to stop and stay perfectly still as somebody searched around for their coat in the dark. I’m not sure if that person noticed that there were two people having sex on their coat. Then when that one person left, we continued to have sex on the coats.
I realize that this is a gross thing to do to somebody’s coat. I would not particularly want strange people I don’t know to have sex on my coat. Probably. I would have to see the people with my own eyes first. I definitely wouldn’t want to discover any kind of sex-related stain on my coat without knowing where it came from. It’s hard to say how I’d react to it, though. I have no moral high ground here. I’ve had sex on peoples’ coats. Once you do that, the cat is kind of out of the bag as far as hypothetical reactions to a person having sex on your coat. Mostly I think it’s permissible as “a stupid thing that happened in college,” whether you’re talking about having sex on coats or having coats under sex.
And technically it was the coats that were intruding. They were on her bed.
I know one thing for sure about my hypothetical reaction to a couple of people having sex on my coat: it would involve astonishment. That’s because since having sex on the coatroom bed that one time in college I have never ever put my coat on a bed at a party. You just never know what’s going to happen. I prefer to put my coat somewhere I can be reasonably sure it won’t be sexed-upon. Like hanging in a closet or under the bed or up on top of the photo booth or wedged behind the refrigerator. The more obscure and unsex-like place I can put my coat when I’m at a party, the happier I am.
There are other practical reasons for obscure party coat placement besides avoiding other people’s sexual discharges. For one, if you spend 20 second wedging your coat behind the fridge, chances are good that no matter what happens at the party, you’ll remember where you put your coat. You won’t have to search for it. Behind the fridge is not especially valuable coat real estate. It won’t shift or get lost in a sea of other coats. Nobody’s going to walk off with it by accident because it looks like their coat. It’s just going to be there behind the fridge where you lodged it when you came in.
I also believe that this strategy is a good theft deterrent. I just feel in my bones that my coat won’t get stolen or broken into if it’s behind the fridge. You’d have to really be casing me to even know it’s back there. And if you wanted to rifle through it, you’d really have to draw a lot of attention to yourself. So later if I get my coat out from behind the fridge and my iPod’s missing, I can say, “Did anybody see a guy pulling this coat out from behind the fridge and rifling through it and stealing my iPod and then shoving it back behind the fridge in the exact position I left it in?” And then I’d probably find out about that dude and go do… something.
Another great thing about shoving your coat behind a fridge is it draws attention to you when you’re just entering the party. It’s a great icebreaker. If somebody asks why you are shoving your coat behind the fridge, you can say something funny, like, “safety first,” or “I don’t want anybody to have sex on it.” And then you’re the party weirdo, which is fine because having a party weirdo around at least gives everybody something to talk about, like asking, “Who’s the guy drinking whiskey out of an old jelly jar?” And responding with, “I don’t know; I saw him shove his coat behind the fridge earlier. He told me not to have sex on it.” That guy is always good for a party, and the party is always good to that guy. Parties are about building up mystery points until you get people daring other people to talk to you. It’s way easier to shove your coat behind a fridge than it is to walk up to a stranger and just say hello out of the blue.
The weirdguy effect is also cumulative, like a week later when people ask you what that stain or weird burn mark is on your coat, you can answer, “Oh, I shoved it behind the fridge at a party last week.” Potential girlfriends love this, because you’re like a project they can work on. They can imagine showing you all about how to put your coat on a hanger in a closet.
And that’s great because you can imagine telling them, “But what if this happens?”
And then you put your coat on the ground and start making out on top of it.
Who knows what’s going to happen then. Maybe sex. You can’t plan for these things.
Like, “One time me and my buddies got really bored and we drove out into a hayfield with a pony keg and started this huge bonfire, but this guy got mad and shot at us with a shotgun, and we had to sleep in the woods because our one buddy freaked out and left us out there, but really it wasn’t even a farmer, it was just this one dude’s buddy and the two of them just stole our beer for a party they were having.”
Maybe that’s a good story, maybe it’s not. I don’t know. Nobody really comes out ahead in it. I do know that. You’re either bragging about being duped, or you’re bragging about how you duped somebody, and either way you’re bragging about how important beer was to you and how funny it is to steal the car of and/or have your car stolen by somebody you kind of know. It’s really a lose lose lose lose scenario. Full of stupidity.
I have college stories of my own, and they suck just as much as that one, and they’re full of just as much of the central controlling theme in all college stories as that one in the hayfield I just made up (it probably really happened like 470 times), namely: we were young and stupid and we did something stupid that we wouldn’t do now, but wasn’t it great that we were that young and that stupid at one point in our lives?
Well, yes and no. Yes it’s great to be young and stupid. No, it’s not great that you’re not that stupid anymore. You can and should be just as stupid now as you were in college. I am. I do stupid things all the time. Yesterday I played Dynasty Warriors 6 for ten straight hours. It was very stupid. By the time I was done, my eyeballs felt like they’d been licked by a dehydrated house cat, and I was seeing little life meters above strangers’ heads. But that’s not adequate to report to anybody as if it’s a story. It’s just a stupid thing I did.
It’s not even the stupidest thing I’ve done in the last 48 hours, either. That would have to be not doing laundry. I have continued to not do laundry for a very long time now, and it’s stupid. I’m down to the comparative-smelling phase of getting myself dressed in the morning. Why didn’t I do laundry? Because I had ten consecutive hours of Dynasty Warriors 6 to play. That’s why.
One time in college I had sex in the coat room of a party on top of everybody’s coats.
I had no idea it was going to be sex until it was sex, though. So it’s not like I walked into the coat room and said, “Hey baby, let’s do it on these coats.” But after a little while of making out that’s exactly what ended up happening on those coats. When you’re in college, that’s how sex works sometimes. If you’re good at making out, sometimes it just turns into sex kind of by accident. Kissing and having sex are two points on the same continuum, and nobody’s discovered the rules of where one should turn into another because everybody’s only had sex like 4 times ever. So it’s possible and even vaguely likely that you could accidentally have sex on everybody’s coats.
At one point we had to stop and stay perfectly still as somebody searched around for their coat in the dark. I’m not sure if that person noticed that there were two people having sex on their coat. Then when that one person left, we continued to have sex on the coats.
I realize that this is a gross thing to do to somebody’s coat. I would not particularly want strange people I don’t know to have sex on my coat. Probably. I would have to see the people with my own eyes first. I definitely wouldn’t want to discover any kind of sex-related stain on my coat without knowing where it came from. It’s hard to say how I’d react to it, though. I have no moral high ground here. I’ve had sex on peoples’ coats. Once you do that, the cat is kind of out of the bag as far as hypothetical reactions to a person having sex on your coat. Mostly I think it’s permissible as “a stupid thing that happened in college,” whether you’re talking about having sex on coats or having coats under sex.
And technically it was the coats that were intruding. They were on her bed.
I know one thing for sure about my hypothetical reaction to a couple of people having sex on my coat: it would involve astonishment. That’s because since having sex on the coatroom bed that one time in college I have never ever put my coat on a bed at a party. You just never know what’s going to happen. I prefer to put my coat somewhere I can be reasonably sure it won’t be sexed-upon. Like hanging in a closet or under the bed or up on top of the photo booth or wedged behind the refrigerator. The more obscure and unsex-like place I can put my coat when I’m at a party, the happier I am.
There are other practical reasons for obscure party coat placement besides avoiding other people’s sexual discharges. For one, if you spend 20 second wedging your coat behind the fridge, chances are good that no matter what happens at the party, you’ll remember where you put your coat. You won’t have to search for it. Behind the fridge is not especially valuable coat real estate. It won’t shift or get lost in a sea of other coats. Nobody’s going to walk off with it by accident because it looks like their coat. It’s just going to be there behind the fridge where you lodged it when you came in.
I also believe that this strategy is a good theft deterrent. I just feel in my bones that my coat won’t get stolen or broken into if it’s behind the fridge. You’d have to really be casing me to even know it’s back there. And if you wanted to rifle through it, you’d really have to draw a lot of attention to yourself. So later if I get my coat out from behind the fridge and my iPod’s missing, I can say, “Did anybody see a guy pulling this coat out from behind the fridge and rifling through it and stealing my iPod and then shoving it back behind the fridge in the exact position I left it in?” And then I’d probably find out about that dude and go do… something.
Another great thing about shoving your coat behind a fridge is it draws attention to you when you’re just entering the party. It’s a great icebreaker. If somebody asks why you are shoving your coat behind the fridge, you can say something funny, like, “safety first,” or “I don’t want anybody to have sex on it.” And then you’re the party weirdo, which is fine because having a party weirdo around at least gives everybody something to talk about, like asking, “Who’s the guy drinking whiskey out of an old jelly jar?” And responding with, “I don’t know; I saw him shove his coat behind the fridge earlier. He told me not to have sex on it.” That guy is always good for a party, and the party is always good to that guy. Parties are about building up mystery points until you get people daring other people to talk to you. It’s way easier to shove your coat behind a fridge than it is to walk up to a stranger and just say hello out of the blue.
The weirdguy effect is also cumulative, like a week later when people ask you what that stain or weird burn mark is on your coat, you can answer, “Oh, I shoved it behind the fridge at a party last week.” Potential girlfriends love this, because you’re like a project they can work on. They can imagine showing you all about how to put your coat on a hanger in a closet.
And that’s great because you can imagine telling them, “But what if this happens?”
And then you put your coat on the ground and start making out on top of it.
Who knows what’s going to happen then. Maybe sex. You can’t plan for these things.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Guide to Knowing You’re Not Gay.
There’s only one way to know for sure that you’re not gay, and that’s to do something kind of gay and then hate it. Have I done something kind of gay? Yes. I have. And I’m not gay. I’m certain that I’m not gay.
My upbringing was a little weird in terms of gay things. I didn’t have two moms or two dads or anything. I had one of each. And they’re still together. I guess that qualifies as weird these days. Even weirder, I was brought up to not think it’s at all a bad or strange thing to be gay. To the contrary, I was in an environment at the height of the political correctness movement that actively encouraged gayness through the condescension of “universal tolerance and acceptance.”
For a while there it was somewhat chic to accept the hell out of anybody. Actually, it still is in some circles. This is mostly in “liberal America,” where Teva-footed middle-aged white academic types add a competitive air to their sense of liberated openmindedness by embracing ever more obscure pet causes. Save the pigmy hippo. End animal husbandry. Fight against third world tooth decay. These people traipse around passionately discussing the dangers of 19th century imperial colonialism while at the same time enrolling in African dance lessons and leading a class on “Eastern sexual spirituality” at the local Baha’i temple. It is a world largely free of self-awareness and irony. And of course I’m generalizing.
But to me it seemed, during my pre-and-during adolescence, that it was “cool” to a certain population to befriend and more importantly advertise one’s friendship (and hence kinship and total I-can-totally-identify-with-this-entire-subdivision-of-human-population level understanding) with the most marginalized, oppressed, and underrepresented minority groups possible. And like a Tony Hawk skateboarding video game, you got bonus points for combinations. If you were able to convince your other white liberal American buddies that you were actually friends with a transgendered albino Eskimo with sickle cell anemia, you won. You just won the whole thing. That was the general atmosphere.
For me at least. I’m talking about the early to mid 90’s, here. It was a very, very idiotically naïve time for American liberalism. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me. I was in middle school at the time. In middle school one’s greatest sociological impulse is to stick out as little as possible so as to not expose oneself to ridicule. So it’s kind of a healthy but nonetheless cringeworthy anathema to go around bragging about how different you and your friends are. It helped me at the same time as it made me want to run for dear life to the safety of a regionally-approved Starter jacket and a pair of baggy “Used Jeans.” But I wasn’t rich or mean enough to ever be a cool kid. So I just had to sit around in the margins quietly noticing ironic inconsistencies in my general environment’s philosophies. But maybe I was also helped by the “we love everybody, even especially the weirdest people, Kum Ba Yah,” mantra to not feel so bad that I had neither the money nor the requisite meanness to ever be a “cool kid.”
Helpfulness aside, you can’t treat the whole world like it’s got the battered, queasy ego of a 13 year old kid. The world is more complicated than that, and unlike with a 13 year old kid, you don’t actually know any better than he does what’s best for him. I’m not sure if “American liberalism” is past this yet, or whatever, and I don’t really care. I pretty much quit that scene around the time I finally got a driver’s license. I’m an Epicurean now, which is shorthand for "don't involve me, I'm trying to get laid."
Anyway, I was raised to not bat an eye at gay stuff. Not a single eye bat. In fact, I marched in a huge gay rights rally in Washington DC with my Mom, my Dad, and my two little brothers. I was 15 at the time. As far as I know, none of us are gay. It was just something we did because it was 1995 and I have a gay uncle and it seemed important enough for some reason that we all did it. Didn’t bat an eye. I even got a good amount of 15-year-old wood at the sight of several exposed butch lesbian boobs. Butch lesbians often exposed their boobs at gay right rallies in 1995. I don’t know why. Probably because it seemed like a good enough excuse. I’m sure other stuff happened there too, but that’s mainly what I remember from my time as a 15 year old gay right activist in 1995. The boobs. And the inappropriateness of enjoying the boobs so much.
I was more ashamed of my 15-year-old exposed butch lesbian boob-based boners than those lesbians were of the fact that their exposed breasts were basically encouraging them. Had I confronted one of them with my dilemma, those kindly lesbians probably would have said, “that’s ok, little guy, as long as you don’t ever rape anybody, it’s ok to want to ogle my exposed butch lesbo boobs. That’s kind of what they’re for at this point, it’s a deliberate piece of spectacle that you ogle until it seems like not a big deal and then you’re supposed to adjust to a more equal footing where exposed boobs don’t matter so much. Get it?” Because they were probably liberals, too. All I knew at the time is I’d have a lot to answer for at a gigantic gay rights rally if I got busted for staring at boobs. I kept firm eye contact with the ground, and inwardly chanted, “Boner go away, boner go away!” Even while my outer voice was chanting, “Out of the closet and into the streets!” Or something like that.
This was not even the extent of my political background. Years earlier at the age of 11 I attended an abortion right rally with my mother, and in a huge throng of women milling around the national mall, I proudly chanted, “U.S. out of my uterus!”
It was a confusing way to grow up at times.
But the important thing to get out of it for the purposes of “knowing I’m not gay,” was the idea that being gay was not such a daunting thing. I have a higher threshold for gay things than most straight people, and it’s based on an unshakable belief that gay stuff actually increases one’s chances of seeing a boob. Experience has borne this out a thousand times.
It seems counterintuitive at first, but it’s really not. For instance, the next time this theory came about was in college.
I went to a small liberal arts school in a major metropolitan area with a BFA program in musical theater. Estimates of the gay population of my college while I attended there have ranged as high as 65%. And I saw a lot of boobs in college. Real life boobs. I found that if one allows other people to think you might be gay, then you end up being invited to a lot of crazy gay parties. And you get handed a lot of free drinks and free drugs. And gay dudes who have crushes on you will keep you around by convincing their fag hag friends to show you their boobs. This is something I learned at the tender age of 17. Man, what a great lesson.
You know what else is great when you’re 17? Playing spin the bottle in a room full of people who seem by accounts likely to have some kind of sex later. Sometimes to jumpstart this scenario, you have to makeout with a dude, just to show a degree of comfortable equanimity, even if it’s totally fake. But if you’ve got memories of shouting “U.S. out of my uterus” and imaginary lesbians cooing nurturing words of confidence in your ear, you don’t mind that too much. It’s just like acting. Nevermind that you don’t actually like it. There are boobs in play.
Of course you soon learn that while gay stuff is a great tool for seeing boobs, it doesn’t do a ton for your prospects of meaningful tactile interaction with those boobs. Once the women attached to those boobs learn the extent of your interest in their boobs, they become inversely interested in allowing you further boob access. It’s a pretty hard switch. And it’s understandable. The whole “wait, you’re just here for my boobs?” thing is a fairly severe breach of trust, after all. You were kind of looking at boobs under false pretenses, there.
Still, I will always have fond memories of my pretending-I-might-be-gay-in-order-to-see-boobs period. I’m still fully capable of flirting with a dude. I interviewed for a job at a high end custom-design carpet and interior design dealer recently, and I all but dropped my pencil and bent over at the waist to pick it up. I wanted that job. It was all gay dudes in that office. Occasionally I’ll backslide into bouts of “gay chicken,” where as a gag I’ll display my comfort level with all things gay in order to freak people out.
Does this make me gay? No. It does not. I know that for a fact. Why? Because of the one time something crossed a line. (By the way, this is overdramatic. Nothing serious happened.)
Later in my college career, after having been through the whole “pretend you’re gay or at least hint that you may be gay, and then reap the boob-looking rewards” to “wait, if you ever want to have sex with a girl without also having sex with a dude at the same time, you should try another more honesty-based tactic” transition, I started hanging with a somewhat older crowd. I lived off campus, and I was tired of the typical stupid underclassmen stuff. I wanted more of a typical stupid recent college graduates who are 23 or 24 type of thing.
So there was this one dude who I thought was a cool guy. Then later we were at a party. And there was dancing. And he started dancing with me. And I thought “oh, this cool guy that I think is funny is dancing with me, good one, cool guy.” Do I started dancing with him. Just your typical Beyonce-style joke dancing. Or so I thought. And then…
Boner on my leg.
Now I don’t know if everybody reading this has experienced it, but there is pretty much no sensation in the world more uncomfortable than an unwanted, unasked-for boner rubbing against you. I honestly had no clue that this dude was even into dudes. Something happens between college and real life for gays, and it’s their own transition between “holy shit I’m allowed to be gay and my parents aren’t around, I’m going to be the gayest dude ever!” and “I’m just a dude who happens to be gay, no need to go overboard with it. I get it: I’m gay.” So my gaydar wasn’t even budging with this guy. I was used to aggressive underclassmen gays who’d signal their sexual preferences by grabbing your crotch and propositioning you. This dude was a little more subtle.
Anyhow, that’s how I found out this one guy was gay. His boner on the back of my thigh.
That’s also how I found out for sure that I’m not gay. Because almost 8 years later, I can still feel a hot pain in the exact spot on my thigh where that unwanted boner was rubbed. It’s like shrapnel.
I’m not sure what happened next on that dance floor. I think I awkwardly finished dancing to the song, further away from the guy and oddly limping from palpable bonersting like my right hamstring had been cut in half by an arrow, then I went and sat down and apologized to the dude for not being gay. It really wasn’t all his fault. I’m a charming young man with a near-painfully accepting background. I’ve chanted political slogans relating to my uterus. In public. And I genuinely believe the U.S. has no business in my uterus. I’m kind of gay. I get it. Just please don’t rub your boners on my thigh, world. Because I’m not actually gay. I promise in return not to lead you on anymore. Even if you all of your friends have perfect amazing college girl boobs.
I’m kind of over boobs now too, though. Trust me. I’m over boobs. (Here’s where I furtively glance at your boobs).
Boner go away.
Boner go away!
My upbringing was a little weird in terms of gay things. I didn’t have two moms or two dads or anything. I had one of each. And they’re still together. I guess that qualifies as weird these days. Even weirder, I was brought up to not think it’s at all a bad or strange thing to be gay. To the contrary, I was in an environment at the height of the political correctness movement that actively encouraged gayness through the condescension of “universal tolerance and acceptance.”
For a while there it was somewhat chic to accept the hell out of anybody. Actually, it still is in some circles. This is mostly in “liberal America,” where Teva-footed middle-aged white academic types add a competitive air to their sense of liberated openmindedness by embracing ever more obscure pet causes. Save the pigmy hippo. End animal husbandry. Fight against third world tooth decay. These people traipse around passionately discussing the dangers of 19th century imperial colonialism while at the same time enrolling in African dance lessons and leading a class on “Eastern sexual spirituality” at the local Baha’i temple. It is a world largely free of self-awareness and irony. And of course I’m generalizing.
But to me it seemed, during my pre-and-during adolescence, that it was “cool” to a certain population to befriend and more importantly advertise one’s friendship (and hence kinship and total I-can-totally-identify-with-this-entire-subdivision-of-human-population level understanding) with the most marginalized, oppressed, and underrepresented minority groups possible. And like a Tony Hawk skateboarding video game, you got bonus points for combinations. If you were able to convince your other white liberal American buddies that you were actually friends with a transgendered albino Eskimo with sickle cell anemia, you won. You just won the whole thing. That was the general atmosphere.
For me at least. I’m talking about the early to mid 90’s, here. It was a very, very idiotically naïve time for American liberalism. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me. I was in middle school at the time. In middle school one’s greatest sociological impulse is to stick out as little as possible so as to not expose oneself to ridicule. So it’s kind of a healthy but nonetheless cringeworthy anathema to go around bragging about how different you and your friends are. It helped me at the same time as it made me want to run for dear life to the safety of a regionally-approved Starter jacket and a pair of baggy “Used Jeans.” But I wasn’t rich or mean enough to ever be a cool kid. So I just had to sit around in the margins quietly noticing ironic inconsistencies in my general environment’s philosophies. But maybe I was also helped by the “we love everybody, even especially the weirdest people, Kum Ba Yah,” mantra to not feel so bad that I had neither the money nor the requisite meanness to ever be a “cool kid.”
Helpfulness aside, you can’t treat the whole world like it’s got the battered, queasy ego of a 13 year old kid. The world is more complicated than that, and unlike with a 13 year old kid, you don’t actually know any better than he does what’s best for him. I’m not sure if “American liberalism” is past this yet, or whatever, and I don’t really care. I pretty much quit that scene around the time I finally got a driver’s license. I’m an Epicurean now, which is shorthand for "don't involve me, I'm trying to get laid."
Anyway, I was raised to not bat an eye at gay stuff. Not a single eye bat. In fact, I marched in a huge gay rights rally in Washington DC with my Mom, my Dad, and my two little brothers. I was 15 at the time. As far as I know, none of us are gay. It was just something we did because it was 1995 and I have a gay uncle and it seemed important enough for some reason that we all did it. Didn’t bat an eye. I even got a good amount of 15-year-old wood at the sight of several exposed butch lesbian boobs. Butch lesbians often exposed their boobs at gay right rallies in 1995. I don’t know why. Probably because it seemed like a good enough excuse. I’m sure other stuff happened there too, but that’s mainly what I remember from my time as a 15 year old gay right activist in 1995. The boobs. And the inappropriateness of enjoying the boobs so much.
I was more ashamed of my 15-year-old exposed butch lesbian boob-based boners than those lesbians were of the fact that their exposed breasts were basically encouraging them. Had I confronted one of them with my dilemma, those kindly lesbians probably would have said, “that’s ok, little guy, as long as you don’t ever rape anybody, it’s ok to want to ogle my exposed butch lesbo boobs. That’s kind of what they’re for at this point, it’s a deliberate piece of spectacle that you ogle until it seems like not a big deal and then you’re supposed to adjust to a more equal footing where exposed boobs don’t matter so much. Get it?” Because they were probably liberals, too. All I knew at the time is I’d have a lot to answer for at a gigantic gay rights rally if I got busted for staring at boobs. I kept firm eye contact with the ground, and inwardly chanted, “Boner go away, boner go away!” Even while my outer voice was chanting, “Out of the closet and into the streets!” Or something like that.
This was not even the extent of my political background. Years earlier at the age of 11 I attended an abortion right rally with my mother, and in a huge throng of women milling around the national mall, I proudly chanted, “U.S. out of my uterus!”
It was a confusing way to grow up at times.
But the important thing to get out of it for the purposes of “knowing I’m not gay,” was the idea that being gay was not such a daunting thing. I have a higher threshold for gay things than most straight people, and it’s based on an unshakable belief that gay stuff actually increases one’s chances of seeing a boob. Experience has borne this out a thousand times.
It seems counterintuitive at first, but it’s really not. For instance, the next time this theory came about was in college.
I went to a small liberal arts school in a major metropolitan area with a BFA program in musical theater. Estimates of the gay population of my college while I attended there have ranged as high as 65%. And I saw a lot of boobs in college. Real life boobs. I found that if one allows other people to think you might be gay, then you end up being invited to a lot of crazy gay parties. And you get handed a lot of free drinks and free drugs. And gay dudes who have crushes on you will keep you around by convincing their fag hag friends to show you their boobs. This is something I learned at the tender age of 17. Man, what a great lesson.
You know what else is great when you’re 17? Playing spin the bottle in a room full of people who seem by accounts likely to have some kind of sex later. Sometimes to jumpstart this scenario, you have to makeout with a dude, just to show a degree of comfortable equanimity, even if it’s totally fake. But if you’ve got memories of shouting “U.S. out of my uterus” and imaginary lesbians cooing nurturing words of confidence in your ear, you don’t mind that too much. It’s just like acting. Nevermind that you don’t actually like it. There are boobs in play.
Of course you soon learn that while gay stuff is a great tool for seeing boobs, it doesn’t do a ton for your prospects of meaningful tactile interaction with those boobs. Once the women attached to those boobs learn the extent of your interest in their boobs, they become inversely interested in allowing you further boob access. It’s a pretty hard switch. And it’s understandable. The whole “wait, you’re just here for my boobs?” thing is a fairly severe breach of trust, after all. You were kind of looking at boobs under false pretenses, there.
Still, I will always have fond memories of my pretending-I-might-be-gay-in-order-to-see-boobs period. I’m still fully capable of flirting with a dude. I interviewed for a job at a high end custom-design carpet and interior design dealer recently, and I all but dropped my pencil and bent over at the waist to pick it up. I wanted that job. It was all gay dudes in that office. Occasionally I’ll backslide into bouts of “gay chicken,” where as a gag I’ll display my comfort level with all things gay in order to freak people out.
Does this make me gay? No. It does not. I know that for a fact. Why? Because of the one time something crossed a line. (By the way, this is overdramatic. Nothing serious happened.)
Later in my college career, after having been through the whole “pretend you’re gay or at least hint that you may be gay, and then reap the boob-looking rewards” to “wait, if you ever want to have sex with a girl without also having sex with a dude at the same time, you should try another more honesty-based tactic” transition, I started hanging with a somewhat older crowd. I lived off campus, and I was tired of the typical stupid underclassmen stuff. I wanted more of a typical stupid recent college graduates who are 23 or 24 type of thing.
So there was this one dude who I thought was a cool guy. Then later we were at a party. And there was dancing. And he started dancing with me. And I thought “oh, this cool guy that I think is funny is dancing with me, good one, cool guy.” Do I started dancing with him. Just your typical Beyonce-style joke dancing. Or so I thought. And then…
Boner on my leg.
Now I don’t know if everybody reading this has experienced it, but there is pretty much no sensation in the world more uncomfortable than an unwanted, unasked-for boner rubbing against you. I honestly had no clue that this dude was even into dudes. Something happens between college and real life for gays, and it’s their own transition between “holy shit I’m allowed to be gay and my parents aren’t around, I’m going to be the gayest dude ever!” and “I’m just a dude who happens to be gay, no need to go overboard with it. I get it: I’m gay.” So my gaydar wasn’t even budging with this guy. I was used to aggressive underclassmen gays who’d signal their sexual preferences by grabbing your crotch and propositioning you. This dude was a little more subtle.
Anyhow, that’s how I found out this one guy was gay. His boner on the back of my thigh.
That’s also how I found out for sure that I’m not gay. Because almost 8 years later, I can still feel a hot pain in the exact spot on my thigh where that unwanted boner was rubbed. It’s like shrapnel.
I’m not sure what happened next on that dance floor. I think I awkwardly finished dancing to the song, further away from the guy and oddly limping from palpable bonersting like my right hamstring had been cut in half by an arrow, then I went and sat down and apologized to the dude for not being gay. It really wasn’t all his fault. I’m a charming young man with a near-painfully accepting background. I’ve chanted political slogans relating to my uterus. In public. And I genuinely believe the U.S. has no business in my uterus. I’m kind of gay. I get it. Just please don’t rub your boners on my thigh, world. Because I’m not actually gay. I promise in return not to lead you on anymore. Even if you all of your friends have perfect amazing college girl boobs.
I’m kind of over boobs now too, though. Trust me. I’m over boobs. (Here’s where I furtively glance at your boobs).
Boner go away.
Boner go away!
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Guide to Quoting Movies Socially
1. The Bad Habit.
It’s a bad habit. You could better spend your time talking in adult tones about real life things, or if you’re with your buds, you could do some original jamming-on-real-life-thing riffs that nobody wrote, directed, or produced.
Quoting movies is a bad idea like ironic t-shirts are a bad idea. Sure, they give everybody an idea of your sense of humor, and maybe you get some smiles and laughs out of it, but at the end of day you’re no closer to anybody than when you started. They both have a distancing effect. And also there’s a precious oneupsmanship about the whole thing that’s kind of yucky, like “hey, look what obscure trivial thing I remember about Punky Brewster, aren’t I great?” People who quote movies and wear ironic t-shirts are imminently punchable.
But that said, once you’ve reached a point with people that you don’t care about that stuff, you’re fine. Just know that it’s a bad habit before moving on, like smoking.
2. Girls with girls and guys with guys.
Quoting movies socially is one of the great gender barriers that still exists. If you’ve ever ripped off a quick reference to The Jerk and whatever girl you’re with gives you the “what’s wrong with you?” face while you’re there mugging with the post-quote “hey, The Jerk, right?” face, then you know the burn of busting out movie quotes across gender lines.
I don’t know if girls quote girl movies together in their all-girl friend groups, but I’m willing to bet that they do. That’s probably what they do when they go to the bathroom together; they rifle through every single line of dialogue from The Legend of Billie Jean and then come back to the table glowing like they just shared a hilarious secret in order to fuck with your stupid boy head. Actually, now that I think about it, this could be the most positive thing to come from Juno. It’s the girl quote movie.
But girls are smart about social things so they don’t just say “fair’s fair!” and then get that look on their face like, “Come on! The Legend of Billie Jean!” like how boys do. They’ll maybe let it slip if there are more than three other girls there and they’ve been hanging out together before you got there, but if they do that it’s just to get a laugh out of the other girls who are there, which for sure means that they don’t want to have sex with you and they’d rather you leave them alone so they can have girl’s night out and continue to quote Juno in peace. You have to know when you’re being punked.
Girls only do cross-gender movie quotes if they want your penis to wither, or maybe sometimes if they’re that “just one of the guys” type of girl who makes you kind of sad because if she had a little more self-respect she’d be hanging out with other girls instead of you and your loser friends eating Doritos and quoting Caddyshack on Friday night.
So take your cue from girls, who are smarter than dudes about this type of thing. Quoting movies across gender lines means nobody is getting laid. Which is fine, but if you want to leave that possibility open for yourself, then don’t quote movies around the opposite sex.
I don not know how gay people do this. I don’t think they have a problem with anything other than the government.
3. Know when to say when.
Even if you just watched a movie together and you and your friends loved it to death and all you want to do is go play darts together and quote Borat all night long, then fight the urge. First of all: getting laid is totally out the window because you’re now a circle of dudes playing darts and yelling “den one day he break out of his cage, and he GET dis” whenever there’s a score change. Actually, that sounds like fun and that’s fine. Don’t fight that urge.
But still, there will come a time when overquoting becomes unfun and turns both the night and the movie you loved into kind of a drag. Like when that one dude who sort of tagged along keeps saying “we support your war of terror” while the dart game has dragged into a bullseye-off and people are looking at their cell phones and thinking about where they have to be tomorrow before they decide whether or not to get another beer, and people are seriously thinking about leaving even though it’s not even midnight. And you can’t really blame them for it.
I’m just sayin’. You don’t want to be an overquoter. Err on the side of conservatism.
4. Who cares?
And if you just saw a movie and you can’t get it out of your head and the quotes just keep falling out of your mouth and you can’t stop it, then don’t worry. Just go into the “who cares” zone and have a good time. The funny thing about fun is that there’s a lot of different kinds of it, and sometimes whatever you’re doing is fun to you even though (and sometimes because) it’s not funny to other people. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re always objectively a drag to be around, although with movie quotes, it’s definitely a bad habit.
So if that’s just what you’re up to that night, go on quoting Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and either bore the crap out of everybody or pal around with a bunch of other idiots who also want to do that.
Or both.
I don’t know.
It’s a bad habit. You could better spend your time talking in adult tones about real life things, or if you’re with your buds, you could do some original jamming-on-real-life-thing riffs that nobody wrote, directed, or produced.
Quoting movies is a bad idea like ironic t-shirts are a bad idea. Sure, they give everybody an idea of your sense of humor, and maybe you get some smiles and laughs out of it, but at the end of day you’re no closer to anybody than when you started. They both have a distancing effect. And also there’s a precious oneupsmanship about the whole thing that’s kind of yucky, like “hey, look what obscure trivial thing I remember about Punky Brewster, aren’t I great?” People who quote movies and wear ironic t-shirts are imminently punchable.
But that said, once you’ve reached a point with people that you don’t care about that stuff, you’re fine. Just know that it’s a bad habit before moving on, like smoking.
2. Girls with girls and guys with guys.
Quoting movies socially is one of the great gender barriers that still exists. If you’ve ever ripped off a quick reference to The Jerk and whatever girl you’re with gives you the “what’s wrong with you?” face while you’re there mugging with the post-quote “hey, The Jerk, right?” face, then you know the burn of busting out movie quotes across gender lines.
I don’t know if girls quote girl movies together in their all-girl friend groups, but I’m willing to bet that they do. That’s probably what they do when they go to the bathroom together; they rifle through every single line of dialogue from The Legend of Billie Jean and then come back to the table glowing like they just shared a hilarious secret in order to fuck with your stupid boy head. Actually, now that I think about it, this could be the most positive thing to come from Juno. It’s the girl quote movie.
But girls are smart about social things so they don’t just say “fair’s fair!” and then get that look on their face like, “Come on! The Legend of Billie Jean!” like how boys do. They’ll maybe let it slip if there are more than three other girls there and they’ve been hanging out together before you got there, but if they do that it’s just to get a laugh out of the other girls who are there, which for sure means that they don’t want to have sex with you and they’d rather you leave them alone so they can have girl’s night out and continue to quote Juno in peace. You have to know when you’re being punked.
Girls only do cross-gender movie quotes if they want your penis to wither, or maybe sometimes if they’re that “just one of the guys” type of girl who makes you kind of sad because if she had a little more self-respect she’d be hanging out with other girls instead of you and your loser friends eating Doritos and quoting Caddyshack on Friday night.
So take your cue from girls, who are smarter than dudes about this type of thing. Quoting movies across gender lines means nobody is getting laid. Which is fine, but if you want to leave that possibility open for yourself, then don’t quote movies around the opposite sex.
I don not know how gay people do this. I don’t think they have a problem with anything other than the government.
3. Know when to say when.
Even if you just watched a movie together and you and your friends loved it to death and all you want to do is go play darts together and quote Borat all night long, then fight the urge. First of all: getting laid is totally out the window because you’re now a circle of dudes playing darts and yelling “den one day he break out of his cage, and he GET dis” whenever there’s a score change. Actually, that sounds like fun and that’s fine. Don’t fight that urge.
But still, there will come a time when overquoting becomes unfun and turns both the night and the movie you loved into kind of a drag. Like when that one dude who sort of tagged along keeps saying “we support your war of terror” while the dart game has dragged into a bullseye-off and people are looking at their cell phones and thinking about where they have to be tomorrow before they decide whether or not to get another beer, and people are seriously thinking about leaving even though it’s not even midnight. And you can’t really blame them for it.
I’m just sayin’. You don’t want to be an overquoter. Err on the side of conservatism.
4. Who cares?
And if you just saw a movie and you can’t get it out of your head and the quotes just keep falling out of your mouth and you can’t stop it, then don’t worry. Just go into the “who cares” zone and have a good time. The funny thing about fun is that there’s a lot of different kinds of it, and sometimes whatever you’re doing is fun to you even though (and sometimes because) it’s not funny to other people. Doesn’t necessarily mean you’re always objectively a drag to be around, although with movie quotes, it’s definitely a bad habit.
So if that’s just what you’re up to that night, go on quoting Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, and either bore the crap out of everybody or pal around with a bunch of other idiots who also want to do that.
Or both.
I don’t know.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Guide to Gleefully Squandering Your Potential.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve only ever had people blow a bunch of smoke up your ass about your potential. As far as life-defining struggles go, it’s a good one to have. There are plenty of kids out there who only ever had Mr. Rogers tell them they were special. And that’s just some slow-talking guy on TV who gets boring and weird once you turn like five years old. By then you’re just hoping that Purple Panda shows up in the Land of Make Believe or there’s an “opera” episode or picture picture shows something that’s actually awesome like a lollipop factory instead of something boring that you don’t care about like a soap factory, and everything else is making you super impatient, like how long it’s taking this guy to feed his fish. My point is: Mr. Rogers is a good man, but he’s not enough to convince you that you’re special. It takes a village to do that.
Mr. Rogers does have a point. Yes, you’re actually special from a scientific standpoint. Your arms and legs are different sizes and shapes than any other human being alive. And if you’re a kid in danger of growing up into a world where not thinking you have any potential at all will lead you to be dead or in jail before your 21st birthday, it’s good to hear from somebody somewhere that you’re special and you can do things in this world with your life that nobody else but you can do. I’ll happily tell you that. But you probably don’t have access to a blog and I don’t know where you live. And if it’s in the slums of Rio, I probably can’t make it there. But you’re special. Like for real. You can do anything you set your mind to, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Keep shining. (Or maybe just try not to rape anybody).
Everybody else who’s not an orphan running around in the street child gang in the slums of Rio: you are not special. At all. That’s bullshit. You’re just a dude doing regular dude things. Stop following your dreams. Your dreams are bullshit. Stop pretending that you can claim some kind of ownership over the things you enjoy. You’re not a good graphic designer. Your graphic designs suck. That book you’re working on is a waste of time that nobody will ever want to read. Your YouTube movies are not funny. They’re choppily edited and sophomoric. That art installation is poorly conceived. It does not make me stop to think about anything. It’s apparent that you just got baked and slapped a bunch of shit together and called it art. Your opinions about everything you have an opinion about are boring and uninformed. And I cannot stress this enough: nobody in the world actually wants to see your improv group. Nobody. In the world. Even if you’re great. Even if you’re fantastic at anything you’re doing, all of this is true. And I say all of this to you as a guy who’s following his own stupid dreams and having his own stupid opinions about those dreams. This is all coming from an unspecial person who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about and is lost and confused and clearly more than a little neurotic.
Does that feel better? It feels better to me.
I had a couple of parents who always went all the way up my butt whenever I brought home a B or, God forbid, a C from school. From a very early age I was told how special I was, how talented, and how smart, and I had very high expectations constantly impressed upon me. I was supposed to get straight A's because I could fairly easily have gotten sraight A's. B's and C's were unaccaptable.
This logic haunts me now too, somewhat. The fact that age 29 I am a receptionist at a small company that sells self storage properties in Elgin, IL is pretty much totally unacceptable. My parents might have actually exploded if you’d told them this in 1994. It’s more or less the 29 year old equivalent of never doing my homework and doing well enough on smarts and charm that I can get away with a B or a C, and that’s fine with me because really all I want to do is play touch football with a permanent QB and I don’t give a damn about A’s. If you told 1994 my parents about my current life the only thing that could potentially calm down 1994 my parents, after reviving my Mom, would be if you made sure to mention that I’d be happy, that I’d have a great girlfriend and a community of supportive friends and acquaintances, and I’d be able to do whatever I enjoy in my free time, whether it’s bike jumps or getting baked and watching Voltron or doing creative things like plays and artsy things and comedy stuff. They might look askance at the Voltron thing, but that’s immaterial. The important thing is: Voltron is totally amazing when you’re baked. Totally amazing.
Also I think there’s a point in there about being happy with what you have and not listening to the voices inside of you who’d tell you that you’re somehow worthless because you don’t have more.
But let’s ignore that and concentrate on Voltron for a minute.
Would you believe it if I told you that the special forces team of space crusaders from the galactic alliance of the good planets do not actually form the titular robot until the 4th episode? Even though the title sequence explains how they form the titular robot? Would you believe that? I didn’t when I saw it. (also: I love the phrase "titular robot") The narrative structure of the first four Voltron cartoons must be totally unique in the history of all human literature. It actually moves backwards. There are large sections of it that are best described as “exposition of exposition.” Nobody explains things that have already happened like the Voltron force. If you watch Voltron baked, this narrative structure will make you laugh until your whole body hurts.
This is as good a way to spend the limited amount of time you’ve been given on this Earth as any. If you enjoy laughing at the regressive narrative structure of a cut-rate Japanese cartoon designed for the sole purpose of selling a toy that combines five robot lions into one big robot man, that is.
I don’t feel guilty at all for enjoying and pursuing this activity. Maybe that’s selfish of me and I should technically be spending my time giving pep talks and vocational training to gangs of street kids in the ghettos of Rio, but baked Voltron is more fun. It is not a waste of my potential at all, either. You know what’s fun to people who really are geniuses? Figuring out the universe’s size and rate of expansion based on the complicated algorithms of a distant galaxy’s “red shift.” I could barely write that sentence without falling asleep, but that’s what real geniuses enjoy doing. I’m not a genius, despite the fact that my parents insisted I was in 1990 to the point where I had to go to math camp for a whole summer. Math camp. I was ten. That’s what I did with my summer. If that’s what geniuses do, I want no part of it. I’d rather just get baked and watch Voltron and have that be my potential instead of anything that involves math camp, thank you very much 1990 my parents.
One of the best things that ever happened in my life, in retrospect, was when my Mom and Dad took me to a shrink once when I was in junior high school to figure out why I was underachieving. I remember it being super duper awkward, but more importantly I remember the shrink telling my Mom, who was incensed over my low-effort B’s and C’s, to “back off.” Back off. One of the greatest days of my life. We never saw that dude again.
Of course I’ve got all the neuroses that come from a lifetime of having your parents up your butt, but it’s not like you can ever escape neuroses. You’re going to be weird in some way. I’m just glad that my weirdness comes from being a little too hard on myself instead of from feeling like I can’t tell anybody in the world that I just want to have sex with a big fat hairy dude in pantyhose and a house dress. I don’t. But if I did, I damn sure would. I have no shame-based upbringing stopping me from enjoying all the fat hairy dude panyhose housedress sex I could possibly want. Maybe that's why I want none. I don't know.
But you get the idea. You could go a lot less wrong than being all the way up your own ass about your potential. It’s actually a good thing. And you have to tools to combat it, by saying “back off” to yourself whenever you start to lose sleep over the fact that you’re 29 and you haven’t replaced the overhead bathroom light bulb yet even though it’s been 4 days. Just say “back off.” You don’t have to be a genius, here. You can use the vanity mirror lights and pick up that overhead light bulb when it’s convenient and you have the money.
Another thing: where the fuck do I get off dispensing all this advice, right? My parents told me I was a smart kid for my entire life and I at least partially believe them, that’s where I get off. This means that my central inner conflict is an egomaniacal waste of everybody’s time. I move forward with the assumptions, passed down to me by my oversupportive parents, that I’m talented, that I’m smart, and that I’m special, and, further, these are not only virtuous qualities to have in general, but they're specifically virtues that I undoubtedly possess, and this qualifies me to pontificate about the world at large to anybody within earshot. Whatever I'm saying or doing must be interesting. Aren’t I great, in other words.
No, I am not. I’m just not. Those assumptions are all bullshit. Even if they're all true, which is debatable, they don’t make me any happier or any more interesting or any more anything than anybody else on the face of the earth. Or at least I like to tell myself that. And it's nobody's business if I do.
Even this self-awareness is tiresome. “Creative types” everywhere can follow their stupid, unspecial dreams as much as they want, but the fact remains that nobody wants to hear about an existential crisis. People have their own existential crises to take care of, and some of them are a little more of the “how am I going to feed my kids this week” kind than your average stupid “how come it’s hard to get my shit together even though I’m so smart?” Especially since the answer is clearly, “because you’re just looking out for yourself, and you don’t feel like you really need an overhead bathroom light all that much, which is totally fine, duh.”
Good point about me, me. I'm not special. I should really just stop writing now. For good.
Whoa. Back off, me. I enjoy writing. That’s the only reason I’m doing it. Back off. Also: I am special. There's a dead guy on TV that still wants me to be his neighbor. So at least I have that.
Man.
Now I want to see what the Voltron team is up to. I still can’t believe Sven died (except I can because in the closing credits the Princess is on his lion and he always talked funny so he’s expendable, but still it was surprising when his blood was running down that sword because it’s like, “Whoa dude, kids show!” And you can tell in Japan it was even more bloody, which would probably be way more awesome. Also: what the fuck is up with the rest of the Voltron force? They didn’t even have a funeral for the guy or change their behavior even one little bit. They were just worried over whether or not the Princess can drive the blue lion. Bullshit. Of course she can drive the blue lion, those things are totally useless against row beasts anyway, and once Voltron forms, how hard could it be to control a leg? It’s a knee and a hip and that’s it. Plus rocketfeet, I guess. But still! It’s not like those other guys had special training to learn how to pilot the lions. They just stumbled into the castle and got their lion starter keys and just went right to it. The Princess lives in that castle, you’re telling me she didn’t take a lion or two out for a spin once in a while? Bullshit. Anyway, I guess if you’re on the Voltron force and you talk funny and your name is Sven, it’s no big deal when you die. It’s a just a shame he died because Pidge is ten times more annoying. I can’t even tell if Pidge is a dude or not. All I know is maybe Pidge can talk to mice. Maybe.)
Mr. Rogers does have a point. Yes, you’re actually special from a scientific standpoint. Your arms and legs are different sizes and shapes than any other human being alive. And if you’re a kid in danger of growing up into a world where not thinking you have any potential at all will lead you to be dead or in jail before your 21st birthday, it’s good to hear from somebody somewhere that you’re special and you can do things in this world with your life that nobody else but you can do. I’ll happily tell you that. But you probably don’t have access to a blog and I don’t know where you live. And if it’s in the slums of Rio, I probably can’t make it there. But you’re special. Like for real. You can do anything you set your mind to, and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. Keep shining. (Or maybe just try not to rape anybody).
Everybody else who’s not an orphan running around in the street child gang in the slums of Rio: you are not special. At all. That’s bullshit. You’re just a dude doing regular dude things. Stop following your dreams. Your dreams are bullshit. Stop pretending that you can claim some kind of ownership over the things you enjoy. You’re not a good graphic designer. Your graphic designs suck. That book you’re working on is a waste of time that nobody will ever want to read. Your YouTube movies are not funny. They’re choppily edited and sophomoric. That art installation is poorly conceived. It does not make me stop to think about anything. It’s apparent that you just got baked and slapped a bunch of shit together and called it art. Your opinions about everything you have an opinion about are boring and uninformed. And I cannot stress this enough: nobody in the world actually wants to see your improv group. Nobody. In the world. Even if you’re great. Even if you’re fantastic at anything you’re doing, all of this is true. And I say all of this to you as a guy who’s following his own stupid dreams and having his own stupid opinions about those dreams. This is all coming from an unspecial person who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about and is lost and confused and clearly more than a little neurotic.
Does that feel better? It feels better to me.
I had a couple of parents who always went all the way up my butt whenever I brought home a B or, God forbid, a C from school. From a very early age I was told how special I was, how talented, and how smart, and I had very high expectations constantly impressed upon me. I was supposed to get straight A's because I could fairly easily have gotten sraight A's. B's and C's were unaccaptable.
This logic haunts me now too, somewhat. The fact that age 29 I am a receptionist at a small company that sells self storage properties in Elgin, IL is pretty much totally unacceptable. My parents might have actually exploded if you’d told them this in 1994. It’s more or less the 29 year old equivalent of never doing my homework and doing well enough on smarts and charm that I can get away with a B or a C, and that’s fine with me because really all I want to do is play touch football with a permanent QB and I don’t give a damn about A’s. If you told 1994 my parents about my current life the only thing that could potentially calm down 1994 my parents, after reviving my Mom, would be if you made sure to mention that I’d be happy, that I’d have a great girlfriend and a community of supportive friends and acquaintances, and I’d be able to do whatever I enjoy in my free time, whether it’s bike jumps or getting baked and watching Voltron or doing creative things like plays and artsy things and comedy stuff. They might look askance at the Voltron thing, but that’s immaterial. The important thing is: Voltron is totally amazing when you’re baked. Totally amazing.
Also I think there’s a point in there about being happy with what you have and not listening to the voices inside of you who’d tell you that you’re somehow worthless because you don’t have more.
But let’s ignore that and concentrate on Voltron for a minute.
Would you believe it if I told you that the special forces team of space crusaders from the galactic alliance of the good planets do not actually form the titular robot until the 4th episode? Even though the title sequence explains how they form the titular robot? Would you believe that? I didn’t when I saw it. (also: I love the phrase "titular robot") The narrative structure of the first four Voltron cartoons must be totally unique in the history of all human literature. It actually moves backwards. There are large sections of it that are best described as “exposition of exposition.” Nobody explains things that have already happened like the Voltron force. If you watch Voltron baked, this narrative structure will make you laugh until your whole body hurts.
This is as good a way to spend the limited amount of time you’ve been given on this Earth as any. If you enjoy laughing at the regressive narrative structure of a cut-rate Japanese cartoon designed for the sole purpose of selling a toy that combines five robot lions into one big robot man, that is.
I don’t feel guilty at all for enjoying and pursuing this activity. Maybe that’s selfish of me and I should technically be spending my time giving pep talks and vocational training to gangs of street kids in the ghettos of Rio, but baked Voltron is more fun. It is not a waste of my potential at all, either. You know what’s fun to people who really are geniuses? Figuring out the universe’s size and rate of expansion based on the complicated algorithms of a distant galaxy’s “red shift.” I could barely write that sentence without falling asleep, but that’s what real geniuses enjoy doing. I’m not a genius, despite the fact that my parents insisted I was in 1990 to the point where I had to go to math camp for a whole summer. Math camp. I was ten. That’s what I did with my summer. If that’s what geniuses do, I want no part of it. I’d rather just get baked and watch Voltron and have that be my potential instead of anything that involves math camp, thank you very much 1990 my parents.
One of the best things that ever happened in my life, in retrospect, was when my Mom and Dad took me to a shrink once when I was in junior high school to figure out why I was underachieving. I remember it being super duper awkward, but more importantly I remember the shrink telling my Mom, who was incensed over my low-effort B’s and C’s, to “back off.” Back off. One of the greatest days of my life. We never saw that dude again.
Of course I’ve got all the neuroses that come from a lifetime of having your parents up your butt, but it’s not like you can ever escape neuroses. You’re going to be weird in some way. I’m just glad that my weirdness comes from being a little too hard on myself instead of from feeling like I can’t tell anybody in the world that I just want to have sex with a big fat hairy dude in pantyhose and a house dress. I don’t. But if I did, I damn sure would. I have no shame-based upbringing stopping me from enjoying all the fat hairy dude panyhose housedress sex I could possibly want. Maybe that's why I want none. I don't know.
But you get the idea. You could go a lot less wrong than being all the way up your own ass about your potential. It’s actually a good thing. And you have to tools to combat it, by saying “back off” to yourself whenever you start to lose sleep over the fact that you’re 29 and you haven’t replaced the overhead bathroom light bulb yet even though it’s been 4 days. Just say “back off.” You don’t have to be a genius, here. You can use the vanity mirror lights and pick up that overhead light bulb when it’s convenient and you have the money.
Another thing: where the fuck do I get off dispensing all this advice, right? My parents told me I was a smart kid for my entire life and I at least partially believe them, that’s where I get off. This means that my central inner conflict is an egomaniacal waste of everybody’s time. I move forward with the assumptions, passed down to me by my oversupportive parents, that I’m talented, that I’m smart, and that I’m special, and, further, these are not only virtuous qualities to have in general, but they're specifically virtues that I undoubtedly possess, and this qualifies me to pontificate about the world at large to anybody within earshot. Whatever I'm saying or doing must be interesting. Aren’t I great, in other words.
No, I am not. I’m just not. Those assumptions are all bullshit. Even if they're all true, which is debatable, they don’t make me any happier or any more interesting or any more anything than anybody else on the face of the earth. Or at least I like to tell myself that. And it's nobody's business if I do.
Even this self-awareness is tiresome. “Creative types” everywhere can follow their stupid, unspecial dreams as much as they want, but the fact remains that nobody wants to hear about an existential crisis. People have their own existential crises to take care of, and some of them are a little more of the “how am I going to feed my kids this week” kind than your average stupid “how come it’s hard to get my shit together even though I’m so smart?” Especially since the answer is clearly, “because you’re just looking out for yourself, and you don’t feel like you really need an overhead bathroom light all that much, which is totally fine, duh.”
Good point about me, me. I'm not special. I should really just stop writing now. For good.
Whoa. Back off, me. I enjoy writing. That’s the only reason I’m doing it. Back off. Also: I am special. There's a dead guy on TV that still wants me to be his neighbor. So at least I have that.
Man.
Now I want to see what the Voltron team is up to. I still can’t believe Sven died (except I can because in the closing credits the Princess is on his lion and he always talked funny so he’s expendable, but still it was surprising when his blood was running down that sword because it’s like, “Whoa dude, kids show!” And you can tell in Japan it was even more bloody, which would probably be way more awesome. Also: what the fuck is up with the rest of the Voltron force? They didn’t even have a funeral for the guy or change their behavior even one little bit. They were just worried over whether or not the Princess can drive the blue lion. Bullshit. Of course she can drive the blue lion, those things are totally useless against row beasts anyway, and once Voltron forms, how hard could it be to control a leg? It’s a knee and a hip and that’s it. Plus rocketfeet, I guess. But still! It’s not like those other guys had special training to learn how to pilot the lions. They just stumbled into the castle and got their lion starter keys and just went right to it. The Princess lives in that castle, you’re telling me she didn’t take a lion or two out for a spin once in a while? Bullshit. Anyway, I guess if you’re on the Voltron force and you talk funny and your name is Sven, it’s no big deal when you die. It’s a just a shame he died because Pidge is ten times more annoying. I can’t even tell if Pidge is a dude or not. All I know is maybe Pidge can talk to mice. Maybe.)
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Guide to Actually Being in a Relationship.
1. The Art of Compromise.
If you’re in a relationship with somebody, you have to make a few compromises. You also have to figure out which ones to make and which ones not to make. While you’re making them. And there’s no set of rules anywhere, and it’s confusing, and if you talk to other people about it they’ll get really bored and pretend to listen to you until it’s their turn to tell you all about their problems.
The trick with relationships is to make sure things in the early going are not going to ruin things later. Like if you’re dating somebody for a month and it’s going well and they ask you for a key to your apartment because your buzzer’s broken and you don’t always get cell reception at your house unless you lean halfway out of the bay window, and your first thought is, “Wait, a key to my place, so you can just stop by without checking first? Isn’t that a pretty big step? I can’t even remember your brother’s name yet. Slow down there, Seabiscuit.” Then don’t give her that key. You’re just going to have to take it back in another couple of months after you look down at your lavender v-neck sweater she bought you “for no reason” and realize that you haven’t put your foot down once in the last three months and you basically only have half of one ball left.
The whole “men are afraid of commitment” thing is pretty overblown, but there are some merits to it. Like if that’s what women think, then great, we can just say, “I’m afraid of commitment,” and they sort of understand that they need to back off a little. But men aren’t afraid of commitment. We’re just afraid of women changing us faster than we want to change ourselves. And we’re afraid of doing it all for the wrong woman. Plus we probably also want to have sex with some other people before we die. We don’t know yet. Other than that, though, we have no problem with commitment. Bring it on.
Anyway, you need to be careful in those first few months, because that’s when you’re all lovey dovey and stupid and going on picnics and romantic stuff like that, and you’ll be tempted to make a few overreaching compromises in the interest of keeping the puppy love afloat. Then later when that wears off, you’ll be like, “Wait, we live together? HOLY SHIT.”
So avoid that. Take things slow. Be realistic and honest with each other. You don’t have to share every little doubt you have about things with her, but you should at least be able to say things like “I just want to take things slow and really be realistic and honest with each other so this doesn’t snowball into something bigger than we both want.”
Something like that. I don’t know. Who knows how women think. But you say things like that, and at least there’s some sort of reasonable expectation that maybe you don’t want to spend an entire day playing Chinese checkers with her Grandma. At least not until after she’s seen you puke and dealt with it. That’s a reasonable compromise. Like maybe Chinese checkers with Grandma is a nice thirtieth date, rather than a perfect twelfth date.
If you’re with somebody you actually want to be with, you are eventually going to spend an entire day playing Chinese checkers with her Grandma. It’s a good test. If you can’t see yourself playing Chinese checkers with your girlfriend and her Grandma, then it’s time to end things. That’s the type of thing that only real couples do. But you can’t just rush into it all willy nilly, or else it’s going to be super weird. You have to earn Chinese checkers. You have to grow into it naturally to get to the point where it’s time to spend the day playing Chinese checkers with Grandma, and when you leave the house you’re actually kind of excited about it. You can’t just do all the little things like that that are symptoms of a good relationship and then assume you have a good relationship. You have to have a solid relationship first. Then the symptoms will just be there. Otherwise it’s candy for dinner.
These are the kinds of things you can say out loud in a relationship if you’re feeling railroaded into playing Chinese checkers too soon. You will sound like a fucking idiot when you say them, because dudes always sound like fucking idiots when they talk about their relationships, and women are smarter at this sort of thing, so they’ll talk you into a weird talking trap, or else they’ll be like “oh,” and then not say anything and you’ll feel the need to explain it again, so that this time they “really understand what I’m talking about,” which will make you sound even more stupid. But still it’s worth it to try.
I know you’d prefer to just play X-box until it’s time for dinner, but if you bust out a little relationshipspeak every once in a while, and it’s a straight shooter kind of talk, then she’ll be encouraged to do the same. That way you’ll work through the little problems more easily before they become big problems that nobody’s talked about for months and when somebody finally mentions something it’s like a dam bursting. A giant unfair dam full of shit where all of a sudden you’re accused of being a pervert because she caught you glancing at her sister’s rack once when she was leaning over, and now you’re basically a rapist (and God knows if they planned that whole cleavage-peek stunt as some sort of secret sister test—wouldn’t put it past them, that sweater was pretty egregious), and now you’re on the defensive instead of trying to assert your perfectly reasonable desire not to go to this one year old’s birthday party on your day off. Talking about the state of your relationship is a preferable alternative to this, although you can never completely avoid these kinds of things.
The stuff you shouldn’t say in these relationship talks is the secret stuff that couldn’t possibly be anything but insulting. Stuff like, “I’m just not sure yours is the last vagina I ever want to engage in some kind of touching scenario.” Of course you’re not sure. Just keep that to yourself. Women are not going to get behind the “hesitancy to get involved in mutually exclusive genital touching” sentiment anyway. It’s not like they’re downloading dicktouching movies off of the internet. Think of how rarely they touch your penis, which as far as you’re concerned is basically never if they can help it.
They are thinking other girl doubts, though, like, “I hope he figures out how to work my body soon because I can’t fake orgasms for the rest of my life.” And you don’t know they’re doing that, but you’re pretty glad they’re keeping those things quiet. Women have an elusive grace about keeping important things quiet. That’s part of why they talk about stuff like sweater colors all the time. It’s like therapy for never expressing themselves. If they said what they really felt all the time, you’d be scared to leave your house, much less talk to one of them. They know this. Pretty much every waking hour of a woman’s life is a giant compromise. That’s what I think, anyway. That’s why they get so mad at you for not feeling like doing something. Because they always do stuff for you that they don’t feel like doing, and they never make a big fuss about it like you do, and it’s your fault for not knowing that even though there’s no way for you to know that without them telling you except for some very nonspecific body language that could just as easily mean “I’m constipated” as “I don’t want to watch ‘Strange Brew’ because I’m a female and it’s not funny to me.” Anyway, your girlfriend has her doubts about you and the relationship, and as much as it would make your life easier if she’d just tell you she doesn’t want to watch “Strange Brew,” you don’t want to know everything she’s thinking all the time.
A good rule for relationship doubts is don’t say anything during a relationship talk unless you could imagine the other person saying, “That’s a valid point,” at the end of it. This means you think about it for an average of 10 days before you even mention anything, just to make sure it’s going to come out right. Edit it down to a concise Powerpoint presentation in your mind. And then release it calmly during a non-fight time, perhaps over dinner that you’re paying for at a moderately priced restaurant you both enjoy. My girlfriend and I have a “relationship talk” restaurant. It’s a reasonable neutral-field place. Even though it’s got a vegetarian menu that I don’t like all that much, I don’t make a fuss over it.
If during these talks you feel like you’re making a valid point and it’s getting ignored or swept under the rug, and that keeps happening, then it’s time to have a more serious relationship talk about unfun things you hear about on Dr. Phil. Things like “boundaries” and “listening.” There’s a chance that this serious relationship talk will take a turn for the worse and turn into a breakup without your even planning it, but that’s ok. Long term, that’s ok. You should break up anyway if there isn’t enough “listening” or “boundaries.”
A secret girl trick they often use is whenever you talk about stuff like not being ready for Chinese checkers, they do this thing where they’re like, “Whatever, you’re overreacting, it’s no big deal if you don’t want to play Chinese checkers with my Grandma, don’t be ridiculous.” And you’re like, “Ok, sorry, I just want to make sure we’re on the same page. I’m gonna go watch football at Pete’s house.” But then later they continue on doing things the same way they’d been doing them before, which still sucks. In the short term, it feels like you “won the argument,” but it’s a pyrrhic victory because there’s no behavioral change afterwards, it was just a stupid fight about the Chinese checkers and nothing else. You were trying to really work on the relationship, and they ended things by making you feel like the immature one. So you think, “Yeah, I’m the immature one. Next time I’m not even going to fight against whatever it is.” And things keep going that way even though you’re not happy with them. That trick is bad news.
The reason why it’s bad news is, of course, because they’re right. They fucking own you right now. And maybe you don’t want to be owned yet. Eventually you will, but not yet. If that Jedi mind trick thing keeps happening, though, and you keep being like “waitaminute!” about it, then you’ve got to have a serious talk. Because that’s not a relationship. That’s two people kickboxing. With their miiiiinnnds. If that keeps happening and you’re like, “Well, I guess I don’t mind it.” Then you’ve hit the jackpot. Not minding it is the secret to happiness in a relationship.
If you’re stuck trying to figure out what to fight for and what not to, there are some universal compromises that you absolutely should make.
Here are a few of them:
- Taking her out for a nice meal where you get dressed up nice and pay for everything and then when you get home your apartment is cleaner than usual and you have sex, including foreplay, more gently than usual without going to sleep immediately after you’re done even though you’ve had two bottles of wine and some really heavy French food. Maybe there is also some kind of massage or “sensual oil” involved. How you do it is not as important as showing an effort. You have to do this every once in a while or else there’ll be some little sensitive dude lothario on a future girls night out who’ll get her thinking about how much better she could have it. Instead, you want your girlfriend to laugh in his little sensitive dude lothario face.
- Flowers every once in a while. This one is tricky because you have to keep it up or else she’ll think, “He just fucked somebody else.” Send them when she’s sick or after a fight. Maybe you can pull off a “just because,” thing, but only do it if it’s a really pretty spring day and you actually thought it’d be fun to. Any girl who tells you she doesn’t like flowers is a big time liar who wants flowers. Come on. They’re flowers.
- Canceling plans to hang out with her while she’s sick. You don’t have to always do this, because if your girlfriend is cool she’ll feel guilty, and you won’t always want her around in the vice versa situation, but you do have to do it more often than you don’t. At least offer. And then if she’s like, “No, no, I don’t want to ruin your evening, I’m just going to watch a movie and get some sleep,” you can do a thing where you show up and surprise her with some chicken broth and you’ll be a hero forever. Or maybe you’ll finally catch her fucking that little sensitive dude lothario she met while you were doing the pop culture bar trivia tournament.
- Rides to the airport and airport pickups.
- Emergency showup responsibility. This can be anything, like a “I cut myself trying to make a bagelwich, I need you to take me to the hospital” thing. Even an “I’m drunk with the girls and we were talking about you and I want yoooou to come heeeeere so I can kiss your faaaaaice” thing where you’re like, “Oh great, I’m in for a fifteen dollar cab ride and a toothy drunken blowjob, and for once I’m in my pajamas and comfortable at home.” You still have to go, though, because that’s emergency showup responsibility. Basically, you have to be dependable, and you have to return phone calls. Otherwise, what’s the point for her? This is the thing that buys you blowjobs. Like good, sober ones in the future. They only happen after you prove yourself a few times.
- Doing a girl thing every once in a while. Like watching “Say Anything” instead of “Evil Dead,” or going to a place where things are pretty, like, I don’t know, a pony show or a doll convention or something. You’ll know it, because she’ll mention it and you’ll think, “A figure skating showcase? Am I gay and somebody didn’t tell me?” But then you’ll go and you’ll be at least moderately pleasant about it, with only a few jokes so she at least sees the ridiculous side of it. If you’re a real sour pill about this type of thing, you’re going to be in the collective doghouse of the official girl tribune of public opinion. And that’s no good. You have to stay on her friends’ good side too, because if you ever win an argument or get some leniency for a fuckup, it’s going to be because your girlfriend’s friends convinced her she’s being too hard on you. They will do this by saying, “He went to that figure skating showcase and that pony show and that doll convention with you, give the guy a break. My boyfriend won’t even eat me out.”
2. Doldrums.
Let’s face it. Life has its ups and downs. So does a relationship. You’re eventually going to get pretty bored with it.
Sometime after you’ve been together for over a year, there will be a fifth consecutive night of deciding what to eat for dinner. It will be a tiresome conversation with opening bids and predictable counteroffers, and at the end you’ll settle on the same thing you always get and then you’ll watch Law and Order together without speaking once, and either you or she will suggest having sex that night, and the other person will just say, “No thanks,” and really mean it, and you’ll both get ready for bed in the same way you always do, and you’ll look over at this person you’ve been spending all your time with and think, “Man, am I tired of those fucking cloud pajama bottoms.”
Then you’ll look down at your own self, bulging a little around the middle from beer and Rueben sandwiches, and you’ll think, “What the hell is happening to me, here? I used to be a lean machine. I used to run around shouting prophetically from the rooftops, drinking until dawn, and discussing really important stuff with really interesting people in really great weird places I didn’t know existed until I found myself suddenly there. I used to have a fun life. Now I’m a big fat nobody. I’m a turd wrapped in a blanket of worldly comforts, tucked away in a dusty corner somewhere so I can quietly die. And I’m 26 years old and I’m thinking this way. Fuck. I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s all her fault.”
And you’ll want to say all this, but your girlfriend will have a big day tomorrow and she’ll ask you to leave the room if you’re going to keep her up. And she’ll have a point. Why should you bother her with all this dumb woe-is-me crap?
Well, the good news is you can’t think that way unless you’re with somebody you actually want to be with for the foreseeable future. You might panic and think you’re hearing your mind’s last whimpering death rattle of independence and assume the only cure is to fool around on your girlfriend. Sure, you could indulge that and go off and flirt with a bunch of barflies, but what’s the point? You’ve come this far. It’s not like those bar-rats are going to have any more exciting pajama bottoms. Not after eight months they’re not.
The real problem here is you’re letting yourself settle into a routine. Your girlfriend is probably thinking a bunch of the same stuff. There’s a chance she’s also thinking “I’m so glad I’ve got this dude around to watch Law and Order with, even if we don’t say a word to each other the whole time.” And she’s got a point there. That’s a pretty great situation. Anyway, how do you bust out of the doldrums?
Well, you do something outside of the relationship that’s a surprise. Not fucking somebody else. More like learning how to operate a sailboat. Or working on a creative project of some kind, or taking kung fu lessons. Something like that where you’re doing something for yourself just because you want to and it has nothing to do with her.
People are lonely. That’s just a fact of life. So much so that when you find somebody to spend your time with, you get to this place where you think, “Well, I’m done. I’m not lonely anymore.” And you do that slap your hands together thing and settle in for a well earned fifth consecutive night of chicken hot pepper noodle from Penny’s and that one SVU episode with the crazy alcoholic woman.
But finding somebody else is not all the work you’ve got to do. Not by a long shot. So you’ve got to get out there and do something with yourself. And maybe buy your girlfriend a new pair of pajama bottoms while you’re at it. It’s a good gift. Girlfriends always like them. Plus, that way you’ll have something less annoying than the cloud pants to look at.
The good news about the doldrums is they teach you that being with somebody isn’t the end of anything. You can still shout prophetically from rooftops in weird places. You just have this girlfriend to do it with now. And if she’s got a big day tomorrow, you can still go out there and get it done on your own. You just have to say no to anything that involves one of your erogenous zones touching one of another person’s erogenous zones. If you can’t, then it’s time to have a talk instead of stewing in the next room.
3. Rules.
There are some good timeline rules that are hard and fast and don’t ever need to be broken.
1 month TOPS (like tops tops TOPS): Sex happens. Like intercourse sex, which is the kind that really counts in terms of relationships. Like “everything is different after you have sex” sex. Which I know is dumb, but girls think that way because they always have to worry about being raped and you don’t.
3-6 months: Serious talk about sex and birth control, including STD testing. You will both want this because condoms are fucking terrible.
After the sex talk: Meet the parents. You shouldn’t have to meet the parents until after the sex talk where you’re done with condoms, but sometimes they’re just going to be there. If you’re dating a person who’s got her parents around all the time, push the sex talk up sooner. The first parents meeting should be awkward because of sex stuff, because that’s funny.
Not before 6 months ever: Key exchange. Some minor one or two day stuff is ok, but keep it in check.
Never before a year: Living together. It doesn’t matter how much you like each other or how much time you spend together already or how shitty one of your leases is, you should wait for a while until you live together, because that’s a big fucking tamale if you end up splitting.
Not until you’ve lived together at least a year: Getting married. You don’t even really have to get married ever anymore. But it’s a nice gesture. Think of it as a “nice gesture.” It’s also a thing you have to do if there’s a baby situation.
4. Advanced stuff.
Everybody knows somebody whose parents have this ridiculous story about how they saw each other everyday from across a train platform, and then one day their Dad had to go the other way to bail his kid brother out of jail, and he accidentally brushed against Mom’s backside, and she was mad at him but they hit it off and they got married three weeks later. Even that asshole friend of yours whose parents met like that and are still together (that friend of yours is fucked for life, by the way) would tell you that for the first year of their marriage they wanted to kill each other. To the point where they actually almost ended up killing each other a couple of times. With a knife.
That first year of marriage is supposed to be tough. It’s supposed to be like the first year after you graduate or the first year after your Dad dies or the first year you have no legs. Except, you know, probably less hard than that. I wouldn’t know, but if that’s true, then I’m willing to wait on it until after I graduate and my Dad dies and I’ve lost my legs.
Once you get to the point where you think of your relationship as a separate entity, like there’s you, there’s your girlfriend, and there’s your relationship, and they’re each as weird and complicated and as important as a person can be to another person, that’s when you’re ready to think about getting married. That’s what people who’ve been married a long time talk about. They talk that way about things. It’s like their life is an episode of Dr. Phil, but nobody can ever change the channel.
That’s why you hardly ever see your married friends anymore. It’s like changing the channel when Dr. Phil is on.
Anyway, if you can’t pull off that much caring about shit, and you can’t handle a lifetime of letting things go even when you know for a fact that you’re right this time and your life would probably be considerably easier for the next two days if she’d just listen to you about this one fucking thing, then you shouldn’t be getting married yet. Maybe not to this person, if that’s all they want from you. Maybe not ever. Or maybe you should just get over yourself and fucking go for it for once in your life. If you turn out to be totally wrong about your own ability to deal with shit, it’s not like ugly heart-rending divorces are totally unheard of.
I say once you get to 5 years and 30+ years old you’re going to have to shit or get off the pot. It’s fine if you want to wait until the last possible second, too. Like if it’s really 6 years because the last one was a yearlong engagement. That’s fine. You might have spent an extra year on the pot, but at least you were really busy shitting.
There’s a pretty good chance that if you‘ve gotten to 5 years, you’ve been through some sort of highly painful little event that sometimes ends relationships. Good. It’s not like those are going away forever. You should probably have one serious gutcheck moment under your belt before you tie the knot. I’m not saying you have to go out and cheat and then talk to your girlfriend about it. It’s good enough to go out and really really consider cheating, like consider it a whole lot, and then come home and be like “I really really considered cheating on you tonight a whole lot,” and have a kind of hurtful adult talk about what it means to the two of you to be together.
You’ve got to get through a situation like that, I think. It’s the sort of thing you can only do if you don’t give a shit enough to say it, but you also still give a shit enough to say it. I think that’s the territory where you’re supposed to live if you’re gonna pull off the whole forever thing. Not everyday, but you’ve got to have been there a few times.
Yuck. This is not douchebag stuff, though. I mean it’s douchebaggy, but it’s not the sort of thing a true douchebag would pull. Lowercase d douchebags stay a million miles from this sort of thing. Bigtime hurt talks are for capitol D Douchebags.
But it’s good to know what you’re headed for if ever “work” seems like a good idea. You know, just by accident.
If you’re in a relationship with somebody, you have to make a few compromises. You also have to figure out which ones to make and which ones not to make. While you’re making them. And there’s no set of rules anywhere, and it’s confusing, and if you talk to other people about it they’ll get really bored and pretend to listen to you until it’s their turn to tell you all about their problems.
The trick with relationships is to make sure things in the early going are not going to ruin things later. Like if you’re dating somebody for a month and it’s going well and they ask you for a key to your apartment because your buzzer’s broken and you don’t always get cell reception at your house unless you lean halfway out of the bay window, and your first thought is, “Wait, a key to my place, so you can just stop by without checking first? Isn’t that a pretty big step? I can’t even remember your brother’s name yet. Slow down there, Seabiscuit.” Then don’t give her that key. You’re just going to have to take it back in another couple of months after you look down at your lavender v-neck sweater she bought you “for no reason” and realize that you haven’t put your foot down once in the last three months and you basically only have half of one ball left.
The whole “men are afraid of commitment” thing is pretty overblown, but there are some merits to it. Like if that’s what women think, then great, we can just say, “I’m afraid of commitment,” and they sort of understand that they need to back off a little. But men aren’t afraid of commitment. We’re just afraid of women changing us faster than we want to change ourselves. And we’re afraid of doing it all for the wrong woman. Plus we probably also want to have sex with some other people before we die. We don’t know yet. Other than that, though, we have no problem with commitment. Bring it on.
Anyway, you need to be careful in those first few months, because that’s when you’re all lovey dovey and stupid and going on picnics and romantic stuff like that, and you’ll be tempted to make a few overreaching compromises in the interest of keeping the puppy love afloat. Then later when that wears off, you’ll be like, “Wait, we live together? HOLY SHIT.”
So avoid that. Take things slow. Be realistic and honest with each other. You don’t have to share every little doubt you have about things with her, but you should at least be able to say things like “I just want to take things slow and really be realistic and honest with each other so this doesn’t snowball into something bigger than we both want.”
Something like that. I don’t know. Who knows how women think. But you say things like that, and at least there’s some sort of reasonable expectation that maybe you don’t want to spend an entire day playing Chinese checkers with her Grandma. At least not until after she’s seen you puke and dealt with it. That’s a reasonable compromise. Like maybe Chinese checkers with Grandma is a nice thirtieth date, rather than a perfect twelfth date.
If you’re with somebody you actually want to be with, you are eventually going to spend an entire day playing Chinese checkers with her Grandma. It’s a good test. If you can’t see yourself playing Chinese checkers with your girlfriend and her Grandma, then it’s time to end things. That’s the type of thing that only real couples do. But you can’t just rush into it all willy nilly, or else it’s going to be super weird. You have to earn Chinese checkers. You have to grow into it naturally to get to the point where it’s time to spend the day playing Chinese checkers with Grandma, and when you leave the house you’re actually kind of excited about it. You can’t just do all the little things like that that are symptoms of a good relationship and then assume you have a good relationship. You have to have a solid relationship first. Then the symptoms will just be there. Otherwise it’s candy for dinner.
These are the kinds of things you can say out loud in a relationship if you’re feeling railroaded into playing Chinese checkers too soon. You will sound like a fucking idiot when you say them, because dudes always sound like fucking idiots when they talk about their relationships, and women are smarter at this sort of thing, so they’ll talk you into a weird talking trap, or else they’ll be like “oh,” and then not say anything and you’ll feel the need to explain it again, so that this time they “really understand what I’m talking about,” which will make you sound even more stupid. But still it’s worth it to try.
I know you’d prefer to just play X-box until it’s time for dinner, but if you bust out a little relationshipspeak every once in a while, and it’s a straight shooter kind of talk, then she’ll be encouraged to do the same. That way you’ll work through the little problems more easily before they become big problems that nobody’s talked about for months and when somebody finally mentions something it’s like a dam bursting. A giant unfair dam full of shit where all of a sudden you’re accused of being a pervert because she caught you glancing at her sister’s rack once when she was leaning over, and now you’re basically a rapist (and God knows if they planned that whole cleavage-peek stunt as some sort of secret sister test—wouldn’t put it past them, that sweater was pretty egregious), and now you’re on the defensive instead of trying to assert your perfectly reasonable desire not to go to this one year old’s birthday party on your day off. Talking about the state of your relationship is a preferable alternative to this, although you can never completely avoid these kinds of things.
The stuff you shouldn’t say in these relationship talks is the secret stuff that couldn’t possibly be anything but insulting. Stuff like, “I’m just not sure yours is the last vagina I ever want to engage in some kind of touching scenario.” Of course you’re not sure. Just keep that to yourself. Women are not going to get behind the “hesitancy to get involved in mutually exclusive genital touching” sentiment anyway. It’s not like they’re downloading dicktouching movies off of the internet. Think of how rarely they touch your penis, which as far as you’re concerned is basically never if they can help it.
They are thinking other girl doubts, though, like, “I hope he figures out how to work my body soon because I can’t fake orgasms for the rest of my life.” And you don’t know they’re doing that, but you’re pretty glad they’re keeping those things quiet. Women have an elusive grace about keeping important things quiet. That’s part of why they talk about stuff like sweater colors all the time. It’s like therapy for never expressing themselves. If they said what they really felt all the time, you’d be scared to leave your house, much less talk to one of them. They know this. Pretty much every waking hour of a woman’s life is a giant compromise. That’s what I think, anyway. That’s why they get so mad at you for not feeling like doing something. Because they always do stuff for you that they don’t feel like doing, and they never make a big fuss about it like you do, and it’s your fault for not knowing that even though there’s no way for you to know that without them telling you except for some very nonspecific body language that could just as easily mean “I’m constipated” as “I don’t want to watch ‘Strange Brew’ because I’m a female and it’s not funny to me.” Anyway, your girlfriend has her doubts about you and the relationship, and as much as it would make your life easier if she’d just tell you she doesn’t want to watch “Strange Brew,” you don’t want to know everything she’s thinking all the time.
A good rule for relationship doubts is don’t say anything during a relationship talk unless you could imagine the other person saying, “That’s a valid point,” at the end of it. This means you think about it for an average of 10 days before you even mention anything, just to make sure it’s going to come out right. Edit it down to a concise Powerpoint presentation in your mind. And then release it calmly during a non-fight time, perhaps over dinner that you’re paying for at a moderately priced restaurant you both enjoy. My girlfriend and I have a “relationship talk” restaurant. It’s a reasonable neutral-field place. Even though it’s got a vegetarian menu that I don’t like all that much, I don’t make a fuss over it.
If during these talks you feel like you’re making a valid point and it’s getting ignored or swept under the rug, and that keeps happening, then it’s time to have a more serious relationship talk about unfun things you hear about on Dr. Phil. Things like “boundaries” and “listening.” There’s a chance that this serious relationship talk will take a turn for the worse and turn into a breakup without your even planning it, but that’s ok. Long term, that’s ok. You should break up anyway if there isn’t enough “listening” or “boundaries.”
A secret girl trick they often use is whenever you talk about stuff like not being ready for Chinese checkers, they do this thing where they’re like, “Whatever, you’re overreacting, it’s no big deal if you don’t want to play Chinese checkers with my Grandma, don’t be ridiculous.” And you’re like, “Ok, sorry, I just want to make sure we’re on the same page. I’m gonna go watch football at Pete’s house.” But then later they continue on doing things the same way they’d been doing them before, which still sucks. In the short term, it feels like you “won the argument,” but it’s a pyrrhic victory because there’s no behavioral change afterwards, it was just a stupid fight about the Chinese checkers and nothing else. You were trying to really work on the relationship, and they ended things by making you feel like the immature one. So you think, “Yeah, I’m the immature one. Next time I’m not even going to fight against whatever it is.” And things keep going that way even though you’re not happy with them. That trick is bad news.
The reason why it’s bad news is, of course, because they’re right. They fucking own you right now. And maybe you don’t want to be owned yet. Eventually you will, but not yet. If that Jedi mind trick thing keeps happening, though, and you keep being like “waitaminute!” about it, then you’ve got to have a serious talk. Because that’s not a relationship. That’s two people kickboxing. With their miiiiinnnds. If that keeps happening and you’re like, “Well, I guess I don’t mind it.” Then you’ve hit the jackpot. Not minding it is the secret to happiness in a relationship.
If you’re stuck trying to figure out what to fight for and what not to, there are some universal compromises that you absolutely should make.
Here are a few of them:
- Taking her out for a nice meal where you get dressed up nice and pay for everything and then when you get home your apartment is cleaner than usual and you have sex, including foreplay, more gently than usual without going to sleep immediately after you’re done even though you’ve had two bottles of wine and some really heavy French food. Maybe there is also some kind of massage or “sensual oil” involved. How you do it is not as important as showing an effort. You have to do this every once in a while or else there’ll be some little sensitive dude lothario on a future girls night out who’ll get her thinking about how much better she could have it. Instead, you want your girlfriend to laugh in his little sensitive dude lothario face.
- Flowers every once in a while. This one is tricky because you have to keep it up or else she’ll think, “He just fucked somebody else.” Send them when she’s sick or after a fight. Maybe you can pull off a “just because,” thing, but only do it if it’s a really pretty spring day and you actually thought it’d be fun to. Any girl who tells you she doesn’t like flowers is a big time liar who wants flowers. Come on. They’re flowers.
- Canceling plans to hang out with her while she’s sick. You don’t have to always do this, because if your girlfriend is cool she’ll feel guilty, and you won’t always want her around in the vice versa situation, but you do have to do it more often than you don’t. At least offer. And then if she’s like, “No, no, I don’t want to ruin your evening, I’m just going to watch a movie and get some sleep,” you can do a thing where you show up and surprise her with some chicken broth and you’ll be a hero forever. Or maybe you’ll finally catch her fucking that little sensitive dude lothario she met while you were doing the pop culture bar trivia tournament.
- Rides to the airport and airport pickups.
- Emergency showup responsibility. This can be anything, like a “I cut myself trying to make a bagelwich, I need you to take me to the hospital” thing. Even an “I’m drunk with the girls and we were talking about you and I want yoooou to come heeeeere so I can kiss your faaaaaice” thing where you’re like, “Oh great, I’m in for a fifteen dollar cab ride and a toothy drunken blowjob, and for once I’m in my pajamas and comfortable at home.” You still have to go, though, because that’s emergency showup responsibility. Basically, you have to be dependable, and you have to return phone calls. Otherwise, what’s the point for her? This is the thing that buys you blowjobs. Like good, sober ones in the future. They only happen after you prove yourself a few times.
- Doing a girl thing every once in a while. Like watching “Say Anything” instead of “Evil Dead,” or going to a place where things are pretty, like, I don’t know, a pony show or a doll convention or something. You’ll know it, because she’ll mention it and you’ll think, “A figure skating showcase? Am I gay and somebody didn’t tell me?” But then you’ll go and you’ll be at least moderately pleasant about it, with only a few jokes so she at least sees the ridiculous side of it. If you’re a real sour pill about this type of thing, you’re going to be in the collective doghouse of the official girl tribune of public opinion. And that’s no good. You have to stay on her friends’ good side too, because if you ever win an argument or get some leniency for a fuckup, it’s going to be because your girlfriend’s friends convinced her she’s being too hard on you. They will do this by saying, “He went to that figure skating showcase and that pony show and that doll convention with you, give the guy a break. My boyfriend won’t even eat me out.”
2. Doldrums.
Let’s face it. Life has its ups and downs. So does a relationship. You’re eventually going to get pretty bored with it.
Sometime after you’ve been together for over a year, there will be a fifth consecutive night of deciding what to eat for dinner. It will be a tiresome conversation with opening bids and predictable counteroffers, and at the end you’ll settle on the same thing you always get and then you’ll watch Law and Order together without speaking once, and either you or she will suggest having sex that night, and the other person will just say, “No thanks,” and really mean it, and you’ll both get ready for bed in the same way you always do, and you’ll look over at this person you’ve been spending all your time with and think, “Man, am I tired of those fucking cloud pajama bottoms.”
Then you’ll look down at your own self, bulging a little around the middle from beer and Rueben sandwiches, and you’ll think, “What the hell is happening to me, here? I used to be a lean machine. I used to run around shouting prophetically from the rooftops, drinking until dawn, and discussing really important stuff with really interesting people in really great weird places I didn’t know existed until I found myself suddenly there. I used to have a fun life. Now I’m a big fat nobody. I’m a turd wrapped in a blanket of worldly comforts, tucked away in a dusty corner somewhere so I can quietly die. And I’m 26 years old and I’m thinking this way. Fuck. I’ve gotta get out of here. It’s all her fault.”
And you’ll want to say all this, but your girlfriend will have a big day tomorrow and she’ll ask you to leave the room if you’re going to keep her up. And she’ll have a point. Why should you bother her with all this dumb woe-is-me crap?
Well, the good news is you can’t think that way unless you’re with somebody you actually want to be with for the foreseeable future. You might panic and think you’re hearing your mind’s last whimpering death rattle of independence and assume the only cure is to fool around on your girlfriend. Sure, you could indulge that and go off and flirt with a bunch of barflies, but what’s the point? You’ve come this far. It’s not like those bar-rats are going to have any more exciting pajama bottoms. Not after eight months they’re not.
The real problem here is you’re letting yourself settle into a routine. Your girlfriend is probably thinking a bunch of the same stuff. There’s a chance she’s also thinking “I’m so glad I’ve got this dude around to watch Law and Order with, even if we don’t say a word to each other the whole time.” And she’s got a point there. That’s a pretty great situation. Anyway, how do you bust out of the doldrums?
Well, you do something outside of the relationship that’s a surprise. Not fucking somebody else. More like learning how to operate a sailboat. Or working on a creative project of some kind, or taking kung fu lessons. Something like that where you’re doing something for yourself just because you want to and it has nothing to do with her.
People are lonely. That’s just a fact of life. So much so that when you find somebody to spend your time with, you get to this place where you think, “Well, I’m done. I’m not lonely anymore.” And you do that slap your hands together thing and settle in for a well earned fifth consecutive night of chicken hot pepper noodle from Penny’s and that one SVU episode with the crazy alcoholic woman.
But finding somebody else is not all the work you’ve got to do. Not by a long shot. So you’ve got to get out there and do something with yourself. And maybe buy your girlfriend a new pair of pajama bottoms while you’re at it. It’s a good gift. Girlfriends always like them. Plus, that way you’ll have something less annoying than the cloud pants to look at.
The good news about the doldrums is they teach you that being with somebody isn’t the end of anything. You can still shout prophetically from rooftops in weird places. You just have this girlfriend to do it with now. And if she’s got a big day tomorrow, you can still go out there and get it done on your own. You just have to say no to anything that involves one of your erogenous zones touching one of another person’s erogenous zones. If you can’t, then it’s time to have a talk instead of stewing in the next room.
3. Rules.
There are some good timeline rules that are hard and fast and don’t ever need to be broken.
1 month TOPS (like tops tops TOPS): Sex happens. Like intercourse sex, which is the kind that really counts in terms of relationships. Like “everything is different after you have sex” sex. Which I know is dumb, but girls think that way because they always have to worry about being raped and you don’t.
3-6 months: Serious talk about sex and birth control, including STD testing. You will both want this because condoms are fucking terrible.
After the sex talk: Meet the parents. You shouldn’t have to meet the parents until after the sex talk where you’re done with condoms, but sometimes they’re just going to be there. If you’re dating a person who’s got her parents around all the time, push the sex talk up sooner. The first parents meeting should be awkward because of sex stuff, because that’s funny.
Not before 6 months ever: Key exchange. Some minor one or two day stuff is ok, but keep it in check.
Never before a year: Living together. It doesn’t matter how much you like each other or how much time you spend together already or how shitty one of your leases is, you should wait for a while until you live together, because that’s a big fucking tamale if you end up splitting.
Not until you’ve lived together at least a year: Getting married. You don’t even really have to get married ever anymore. But it’s a nice gesture. Think of it as a “nice gesture.” It’s also a thing you have to do if there’s a baby situation.
4. Advanced stuff.
Everybody knows somebody whose parents have this ridiculous story about how they saw each other everyday from across a train platform, and then one day their Dad had to go the other way to bail his kid brother out of jail, and he accidentally brushed against Mom’s backside, and she was mad at him but they hit it off and they got married three weeks later. Even that asshole friend of yours whose parents met like that and are still together (that friend of yours is fucked for life, by the way) would tell you that for the first year of their marriage they wanted to kill each other. To the point where they actually almost ended up killing each other a couple of times. With a knife.
That first year of marriage is supposed to be tough. It’s supposed to be like the first year after you graduate or the first year after your Dad dies or the first year you have no legs. Except, you know, probably less hard than that. I wouldn’t know, but if that’s true, then I’m willing to wait on it until after I graduate and my Dad dies and I’ve lost my legs.
Once you get to the point where you think of your relationship as a separate entity, like there’s you, there’s your girlfriend, and there’s your relationship, and they’re each as weird and complicated and as important as a person can be to another person, that’s when you’re ready to think about getting married. That’s what people who’ve been married a long time talk about. They talk that way about things. It’s like their life is an episode of Dr. Phil, but nobody can ever change the channel.
That’s why you hardly ever see your married friends anymore. It’s like changing the channel when Dr. Phil is on.
Anyway, if you can’t pull off that much caring about shit, and you can’t handle a lifetime of letting things go even when you know for a fact that you’re right this time and your life would probably be considerably easier for the next two days if she’d just listen to you about this one fucking thing, then you shouldn’t be getting married yet. Maybe not to this person, if that’s all they want from you. Maybe not ever. Or maybe you should just get over yourself and fucking go for it for once in your life. If you turn out to be totally wrong about your own ability to deal with shit, it’s not like ugly heart-rending divorces are totally unheard of.
I say once you get to 5 years and 30+ years old you’re going to have to shit or get off the pot. It’s fine if you want to wait until the last possible second, too. Like if it’s really 6 years because the last one was a yearlong engagement. That’s fine. You might have spent an extra year on the pot, but at least you were really busy shitting.
There’s a pretty good chance that if you‘ve gotten to 5 years, you’ve been through some sort of highly painful little event that sometimes ends relationships. Good. It’s not like those are going away forever. You should probably have one serious gutcheck moment under your belt before you tie the knot. I’m not saying you have to go out and cheat and then talk to your girlfriend about it. It’s good enough to go out and really really consider cheating, like consider it a whole lot, and then come home and be like “I really really considered cheating on you tonight a whole lot,” and have a kind of hurtful adult talk about what it means to the two of you to be together.
You’ve got to get through a situation like that, I think. It’s the sort of thing you can only do if you don’t give a shit enough to say it, but you also still give a shit enough to say it. I think that’s the territory where you’re supposed to live if you’re gonna pull off the whole forever thing. Not everyday, but you’ve got to have been there a few times.
Yuck. This is not douchebag stuff, though. I mean it’s douchebaggy, but it’s not the sort of thing a true douchebag would pull. Lowercase d douchebags stay a million miles from this sort of thing. Bigtime hurt talks are for capitol D Douchebags.
But it’s good to know what you’re headed for if ever “work” seems like a good idea. You know, just by accident.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Guide to Post-Breakup Communication.
Don't until later.
If you're thinking "it'll be fine, I just want to talk to them and see what they're up to," then that's your brain's way of saying "you still have feelings for them and you can't let go and this conversation is going to be a total drag for one or more people no matter what."
If you're thinking "I wish they would stop calling me, but we've been through so much together I shouldn't just ignore them," then that's your brain's way of saying "you shouldn't have broken up with this person if you were going to get all chickenshit about the possibility that they might not like you so much after the break up. That's what break ups are. Don't be a puss."
Follow through is important for both parties, otherwise it's not really a break up. Then it's some other sad category of thing that sucks for everybody involved.
Run-ins.
Unplanned run-ins should be the only acceptable form of post-breakup communication until at least a year after the break up. (After a year you can start texting them about your yard sale and stuff like that). A year is enough time for almost anybody to be able to think at least somewhat rationally about who they were and what's changed since a year ago. This year becomes "forever" in cases of extreme cheater-style breakups. (Like real-deal-Jerry-Springer-caught-in-the-act-with-your-Dad rather than "I think we should see other people" or "I met somebody I have feelings for that I haven't acted on yet but I want to"--those are pretty much industry standard).
There are two types of run-ins. Run-ins that lead to sex and run-ins that don't.
Run-ins that lead to sex:
These are ok in general because at least you're getting sex out of the deal. I mean, all that old baggage comes roaring back and then you end up with one of the worst "should I even call, and if so, when?" dilemmas of all time, but at least you got sex out of the deal.
I say the rule book is completely thrown out on this one.
Generally if you have sex again after a breakup it means that you still want to at least have sex with the person, and you're probably headed for a one to two month sex-only backslide. Which can be fun. And then when it starts becoming apparent that all the old problems are still there you can rebreak up and begin the whole process anew, but with less pain than the first break up because it'll just be breaking up from a sex-only backslide instead of full on wuv. If you just ended up having sex with the person because you were incredibly drunk and you know it's a mistake like right away, then you don't have to call them after, although by now you should have the balls to tell them that to their face. You already broke up, remember?
Run-ins that don't lead to sex:
There's nothing worse than forced ignoring of somebody who's in the room. It's childish. Even worse is the crazed storm-out. Act like a grown up and nod or wave, then if you're really having a hard time controlling your feelings about being in the same place, quietly gather your belongings and leave in a "I was leaving anyway" manner after like fifteen minutes, with another wave and one of those lip smiles that aren't really smiles. This works for either a not very crowded or a medium crowded setting. If it's like a big party or a crowded bar, then either pull the "hey, it's a public place, I've got as much right to be here as him!" thing or pull a quiet runner.
The thing you don't want to do is get all belligerent and walk up to the person while they're hanging out with their Dad and say something stupid. (This has happened to me.)
In the case of an extreme cheater-style breakup, all bets are off in terms of storm-outs and crazy behavior, and you can totally get a posse together to kick their ass and stuff. That actually makes the night more fun for everybody.
Remember: after a breakup you're going to need your friends a lot. You can take a certain amount of comfort from having a shoulder to cry on, and you can get ridiculously drunk and rant and rave a couple of times, but you should always try to have a sense of humor about it and not be a total bummer. If you really feel like you're going to break down, do it on your own until you don't feel so bad about it, even if it means taking a cab home with runny mascara at like 11:00. You will need your friends a lot, and it's hard to be a really good friend to somebody who's a total mess all the time. It gets pretty old after a while. Pick your battles. Remember, you need them for fun. That's why they're called "friends" and not "therapists."
New boy/girlfriends.
If in the course of a run-in (and remember that the best course of action is a wave or a nod, and approaching to exchange pleasantries is bad form unless it'd be more awkward not to) you're confronted with a new boyfriend or girlfriend, then you should act as gracious as possible, even if it means your heart is having a seizure and your neck is growing a rage-filled boil. And then you can leave quickly. Politely decline all invitations to "sit" and "join-in." Those are just bad form anyway.
Then this is a "get out of jail free" card that you can use to get totally wasted and/or have a breakdown with your friends where you start out the night ranting and raving about how stupid your ex is and how ugly/fat/stupid their new attachment is, and you end the night throwing old fruit off the freeway overpass and almost getting arrested. Remember: if at all possible, channel your rage into a constructively memorable party night with your buds. But if it's a full scale breakdown with crying in the alley, that's ok too. New girl/boyfriends are spooky like that.
If you're thinking "it'll be fine, I just want to talk to them and see what they're up to," then that's your brain's way of saying "you still have feelings for them and you can't let go and this conversation is going to be a total drag for one or more people no matter what."
If you're thinking "I wish they would stop calling me, but we've been through so much together I shouldn't just ignore them," then that's your brain's way of saying "you shouldn't have broken up with this person if you were going to get all chickenshit about the possibility that they might not like you so much after the break up. That's what break ups are. Don't be a puss."
Follow through is important for both parties, otherwise it's not really a break up. Then it's some other sad category of thing that sucks for everybody involved.
Run-ins.
Unplanned run-ins should be the only acceptable form of post-breakup communication until at least a year after the break up. (After a year you can start texting them about your yard sale and stuff like that). A year is enough time for almost anybody to be able to think at least somewhat rationally about who they were and what's changed since a year ago. This year becomes "forever" in cases of extreme cheater-style breakups. (Like real-deal-Jerry-Springer-caught-in-the-act-with-your-Dad rather than "I think we should see other people" or "I met somebody I have feelings for that I haven't acted on yet but I want to"--those are pretty much industry standard).
There are two types of run-ins. Run-ins that lead to sex and run-ins that don't.
Run-ins that lead to sex:
These are ok in general because at least you're getting sex out of the deal. I mean, all that old baggage comes roaring back and then you end up with one of the worst "should I even call, and if so, when?" dilemmas of all time, but at least you got sex out of the deal.
I say the rule book is completely thrown out on this one.
Generally if you have sex again after a breakup it means that you still want to at least have sex with the person, and you're probably headed for a one to two month sex-only backslide. Which can be fun. And then when it starts becoming apparent that all the old problems are still there you can rebreak up and begin the whole process anew, but with less pain than the first break up because it'll just be breaking up from a sex-only backslide instead of full on wuv. If you just ended up having sex with the person because you were incredibly drunk and you know it's a mistake like right away, then you don't have to call them after, although by now you should have the balls to tell them that to their face. You already broke up, remember?
Run-ins that don't lead to sex:
There's nothing worse than forced ignoring of somebody who's in the room. It's childish. Even worse is the crazed storm-out. Act like a grown up and nod or wave, then if you're really having a hard time controlling your feelings about being in the same place, quietly gather your belongings and leave in a "I was leaving anyway" manner after like fifteen minutes, with another wave and one of those lip smiles that aren't really smiles. This works for either a not very crowded or a medium crowded setting. If it's like a big party or a crowded bar, then either pull the "hey, it's a public place, I've got as much right to be here as him!" thing or pull a quiet runner.
The thing you don't want to do is get all belligerent and walk up to the person while they're hanging out with their Dad and say something stupid. (This has happened to me.)
In the case of an extreme cheater-style breakup, all bets are off in terms of storm-outs and crazy behavior, and you can totally get a posse together to kick their ass and stuff. That actually makes the night more fun for everybody.
Remember: after a breakup you're going to need your friends a lot. You can take a certain amount of comfort from having a shoulder to cry on, and you can get ridiculously drunk and rant and rave a couple of times, but you should always try to have a sense of humor about it and not be a total bummer. If you really feel like you're going to break down, do it on your own until you don't feel so bad about it, even if it means taking a cab home with runny mascara at like 11:00. You will need your friends a lot, and it's hard to be a really good friend to somebody who's a total mess all the time. It gets pretty old after a while. Pick your battles. Remember, you need them for fun. That's why they're called "friends" and not "therapists."
New boy/girlfriends.
If in the course of a run-in (and remember that the best course of action is a wave or a nod, and approaching to exchange pleasantries is bad form unless it'd be more awkward not to) you're confronted with a new boyfriend or girlfriend, then you should act as gracious as possible, even if it means your heart is having a seizure and your neck is growing a rage-filled boil. And then you can leave quickly. Politely decline all invitations to "sit" and "join-in." Those are just bad form anyway.
Then this is a "get out of jail free" card that you can use to get totally wasted and/or have a breakdown with your friends where you start out the night ranting and raving about how stupid your ex is and how ugly/fat/stupid their new attachment is, and you end the night throwing old fruit off the freeway overpass and almost getting arrested. Remember: if at all possible, channel your rage into a constructively memorable party night with your buds. But if it's a full scale breakdown with crying in the alley, that's ok too. New girl/boyfriends are spooky like that.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Guide to Reissues of Obscure Regional Soul and Power Pop From the 60’s and 70’s.
Everybody’s got a habit. One of mine is listening to music. Everybody likes music, but not everybody feels involved enough in the process to consider listening to it a “hobby.” I consider it a hobby. Just a hobby. If I was more passionate about it, to the point where I could point to listening to music as being the one thing I love the most in the world, listening to music would probably be at least somewhat of a profession for me. I’d probably DJ. Or be in a band. Or write record reviews for the local dying weekly. But I don’t care that much, and if and when I do, I mostly choose to remain private about it. I also don’t have the time, money, or energy to be chronically obsessed with all things music, although I’ve always had a healthy amount of admiration for people who do. So it’s a hobby. Not a lifestyle.
Maybe there’s a lesson there about not being ruled by your interests. Maybe not. I’m not going to try to shoehorn one in if I don’t have to.
Occasionally, though, something about music spurs enough thought that it turns into a real life thing for me and not just a music-listening thing. Witness the Numero Group.
The Numero Group is a Chicago-based label that reissues regional soul, folk, and power pop/rock from all but totally extinct sources, usually defunct record labels from places you don’t typically think of when you think of a “vibrant local music scene.” Places like Columbus, Ohio, or East St. Louis, Illinois, or Dimona, Israel. Sometimes their releases are from the far fringes of well-known musical melting pots like Chicago and New York. Always they’re immaculately packaged and tell an interesting story of how these songs (usually at least decent songs, depending on one’s personal taste) were created, forgotten, and ultimately resurrected.
The stories are fairly uniform. There’s always some combination of poor funding, poor marketing, poor timing, some degree of self-defeating Axl Rose-esque megalomania, complete lack of business acumen, and/or complete lack of commercial viability in terms of the artists’ creative vision. Picture reasons for a small business to fail, and you have the basic story. It’s rags to rags to rags. Told lovingly within each Numero Group release.
But what about the songs?
They’re good. Sometimes they’re merely decent. Pretty much always the songs suffer from a variety apparent fatal flaws. Usually there’s something to it that shows why it’s been forgotten. Maybe it’s a weird flute too high in the mix, or a series of offkey notes, or a terribly written, not-at-all catchy hook, or the fact that a particular track outstays its welcome after 20 seconds but goes on for six minutes, or is a clear ripoff of a Jimi Hendrix riff, or has a ramshackle quality that I with my highly developed and somewhat irony-laden post-Velvet Underground ear for chaos appreciate now more than any local Midwest R&B DJ could be expected to in 1972, or it’s an elaborately written tune about a weirdly specific subject, or it’s by a group whose name accidentally endorses genocide, or maybe it’s just a straight-ahead, repetitive, and/or wandering mediocre pop song from its era without any particular payoff. Sometimes, depending on the consistency of the release, the only apparent fatal flaw in one of the songs is that there were recorded in Belize City, Belize in the early 70’s, and the recording is just too obscure to have found an audience wider than that particular seasonal flood-dominated British colonial market and the few émigrés from it who were lucky enough to find themselves in New York City with enough disposable income to buy an LP.
I have developed a love/hate relationship with the Numero Group over these releases.
On the one hand, I appreciate all the work and I admire their stick-to-it-iveness and taste. Much in the same way I admire the one guy with the self-trimmed beard at the used record store who’s laughing about this one thing Question Mark said to him at a wedding last year. This admiration is a mixture of, “Thank God for genuine eccentrics like you, who, in their natural habitat, have occasion to make everybody else’s life more interesting by relating anecdotes about obscure garage band leaders who genuinely believe they’re from another planet,” and, wistfully, “There but for the grace of God go I.” It’s kind of the same admiration us barely sane types have for people that are full on over the edge crazy and somehow still making it work.
Plus, you know, it’s awfully nice of these kind gents to go off into the dustbins of the world and put together these excruciatingly well-documented re-releases of this charmingly flawed music from the nowhere regions of popular music’s consciousness. Especially since nobody asked them to, and they’re really under no compunction to share their results with the rest of us. But, you know, nobody asked them to. They’d have done it regardless. They’re weird like that. And God bless them for it.
On the other hand, the releases themselves, and the music that’s on them, rely a little too heavily on this context. It’s “look at this thing we found, aren’t we clever,” or more specifically, “you should check this out, it’s a soul band that formed out of this weird collective on the South Side that was part brothel and part cult, and they all wore these funny hats, and they only made five copies of this ever, and the other two that still exist are unplayable.” And you’re like “that’s cool, I guess,” and you try to get away from the dude, and he’s like “but wait, it’s really good, listen,” and you’re like, “ok,” but you look at your watch, and then he plays it and he’s freaking out about how great it is but to you it sounds like five people moaning in a basement with a shitty drummer, because it’s five people moaning in a basement with a shitty drummer, and really the only reason anybody would like it is it’s weird and cute, like, “nice try, you moaning basement cult whores.” And “nice try” is either ironic or whimsical or totally honest, but it’s still there.
You kind of want to get out of there, because the whole thing makes you uncomfortable. First it’s offputting that somebody could be so obsessive about something to ignore all social cues that tell them to keep it to themselves. Then there’s the whole bragging about obscurity thing. Then there’s the whole “flattery of gained trust” thing where you’re supposed to feel grateful that he’s playing this thing for you because he thinks you’ll appreciate it as much as he does. Then there’s this whole sad image of the cult whores moaning in a basement 30 years ago, coupled with the perverse enjoyment this guy’s getting out of playing it for you now. And then there’s your complicity. Because, admit it, you were curious.
It’s like the queasy alliance between exhibitionists and voyeurs. Kind of. You’d think it’d be a match made in heaven, until you realize that the exhibitionist has the virgin/whore fantasy of making regular people into voyeurs due to the undeniably alluring nature of what they’re exhibiting (or else, on the opposite end of the spectrum, they just want to freak everybody out), and it’s a bit of a downer when the person’s just really into the process of being a voyeur in a way that has nothing to do with what you’re exhibiting. It makes the exhibitor a little less special. Same with the voyeur, who wants to discover something he’s not supposed to on his own. Both are perverts, but when they meet both are going, “Ugh, I can’t quite get off to this because you’re clearly getting off to this and that’s grossing me out.”
Well that’s essentially the interaction you’re signing up for every time you spend money on a Numero Group release. Even if the music’s unbelievably great, and it is sometimes but more often isn’t, there’s still a twinge of “Ugh, you’re really getting off to this.”
Left out in the cold are those moaning cult whores in the basement. They’re just the medium, not the message of this exhibitionist/voyeur transaction. No matter how well-researched or well-compensated they might be for their contributions, which is a matter open for some debate (but not a particularly interesting one).
So why am I even bothering to write about this? Cultural imperialism is a pretty well-documented phenomenon, and so is crusty weird dudes who like obscure records. Where do I fit in?
Well, I’m kind of an aspirational eccentric. I’m not fully crazy about all this stuff. At least that’s what I tell myself. So I kind of pretend to be by telling people things like “listening to music is a hobby of mine.” It’s just music. I know that. And I’m going to die one day, whether I have a promo copy of The Beau Brummel’s out-of-print “Bradley’s Barn” album or not. I don’t know what in the hell I expect ownership of such an artifact is supposed to do for me. Elevate me into some more righteously boastful class of music fanatics? It’s a nice record. Really nice. I like listening to it. I think that’s all I’m supposed to get out of it. But it’s hard to fight the urge of entitlement that comes with owning something slightly rare like that. I have to admit, I get a kick out of it. And in the case of this copy of “Bradley’s Barn,” it’s not a vicarious kick, like the Numero Group releases are. I found a copy of it. I bought a copy of it. It’s not a reissue that some opportunistic label put out. It’s an old realdeal copy of the record that opportunistic me suckered myself into purchasing from a store that opportunistically bought it from probably like a dude or something.
But who gives a shit?
Right. Who gives a shit. Other than me, I expect maybe there are some self-trimmed beardwearers out there who’d be moderately impressed. My record collection is slowly filling out. And I’m doing it for my inner music freak. I guess. I don’t know. I can’t imagine anybody who would admit to giving a shit about who-has-what is a person who’s priorities are in proper order. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking obscure pop music or wooden yachts.
That’s why I’ve got a bee so far in my bonnet about these Numero Group guys. Through their devotion to a highly specialized and arguably noble labor of love, they’re making me feel like a real grade-A asshole. They point out what I don’t like about myself. I don’t even care that I don’t like the music they put out all that much. I mean, I like it all well enough, but I rarely love a whole release of theirs from start to finish. It’s usually 2-5 tracks per release. Sometimes I enjoy as few as zero. Rarely it’s all but a couple.
But I can’t stop myself. That’s the problem. I recently talked myself into the conundrum of media, and about how mp3’s are the regenerative next great singles medium, where every track is torn asunder from its intended sequencing and judged on its own merits alone. I said “well, maybe I should just be downloading the ones I like and not bother with the whole package. Except they don’t let you do that because they’re geniuses. There has to be another solution. I keep getting stuff with all this obscure-for-good-reason chaff they keep shoveling out. It’s a lot of effort and money in exchange for a couple of fantastic tracks per release. I feel like I, the music fan, am being taken for a ride, which is a tradition as old as recorded music.
I should say that of the few tracks off of each Numero Group release that I do like, I really really really like them. This is how I get with music. I find one thing that I like, a song, a moment in a song, and then I delve so deeply into it I can’t get out for months. It’s a lot like a chemical dependency, except I’m talking about obscure XTC deep tracks instead of a coke binge. Just so you know that all of this quandary-over-the-delivery medium crap isn’t always in my head, or that I’m not getting anything out of this music. Quite the contrary. I love it enough to care about it. Hence the love/hate relationship with these fuckers.
Certain Numero Group standouts are so fantastic as to almost make up for the whole plunge into self-doubt over why I’m sometimes neurotic, antisocial, and fetishistic about music. For a little while there listening to my favorites of the collection, whether they’re dramatic psychedelic soul flourishes under a child’s crying over his lost mama, or a gospel group’s drummer going totally apeshit over Jesus, it’s almost to forget the whole sordid process by which these songs came to my ear, not to mention everything else that’s bugging me that day. And that’s why I can’t stop, because that’s the feeling all music fans are listening for.
The problem is loving the good stuff that much makes me feel entitled to my disappointment in the stuff that doesn’t measure up. It’s a real lesson in involvement. So I talked myself into the mp3 format internal discussion. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t enjoying the full backlog of lesser Numero tracks I have. Maybe they just don’t work as well filtered into a shuffling iPod as they might on a turntable, where their esoteric nature is more vital. Is what I was telling myself. So I bought a vinyl subscription to their 2009 releases for a hundred dollars. Of course I did.
I’m holding out hope that this won’t be a totally awful decision. One of the things about mp3’s is they’re so easily compilable. They add up exponentially, until you have more music than you could possibly really listen to, and then the whole goal becomes having the music rather than just listening to it. Vinyl is a step further in that direction because of the elaborate and immediately physical processes involved in playing an LP. It’s almost ritualistic. So I’m getting more and more chronic, I guess. Maybe that’s a good thing. I do have that part of me that wants to be a chronic weirdo who used to roadie for Sonic Youth and who won’t shut up about some Phillipino pop girl group he’s somewhat creepily really into these days. I guess that dude is having his way with me recently.
Part of my problem is I have a rickety belief system ruled more or less by a rigidly constructed belief system imposed by that inner weirdo. One total foolhearty belief is: you can read but not listen before you buy. The idea here is that if I know what I’m talking about (I want to believe I do, but I don’t), I will purchase great music sight unseen based on what I’ve heard and what my suspicions are. It’s a total drag a lot of the time because I’m constantly wrong, but when I get something good, I feel like it’s all based on my intuitive beardedguy smarts, and it’s rewarding on both a “hey this is really great” level and a “aren’t I so smart” level. This is only possible for somebody with endless patience for music. I listen to a lot of mediocre bullshit. A LOT. And I’m prone to exaggerating the rewards. So I guess I can’t really blame the Numero guys for taking me for a little ride every once in a while. I’ll take myself on the same ride whether they’re involved or not, and it’s not like they asked me to go along with them.
I guess that’s what I mean when I say “listening to music is a hobby of mine.” Nobody has that as a hobby. Music’s on, you listen to it. That’s called normal human being. No, I guess my hobby, shameful as it is to admit, is having music to the degree that I get to pretend that I’m a part of it. The plain, painful truth is: for somebody who considers listening to music a hobby, I really don’t listen to music all that much more than anybody else. I just work a little harder to get it.
Fine and dandy. I’m a fetishist, I guess. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I honestly though I was past this. But it looks like I’ve got kryptonite, and kryptonite, thy name is Numero Group. I wish I could quit you.
p.s. If you’re still reading, I’m shocked. Just totally shocked. I promise a real Guide about non-nerd things tomorrow.
Maybe there’s a lesson there about not being ruled by your interests. Maybe not. I’m not going to try to shoehorn one in if I don’t have to.
Occasionally, though, something about music spurs enough thought that it turns into a real life thing for me and not just a music-listening thing. Witness the Numero Group.
The Numero Group is a Chicago-based label that reissues regional soul, folk, and power pop/rock from all but totally extinct sources, usually defunct record labels from places you don’t typically think of when you think of a “vibrant local music scene.” Places like Columbus, Ohio, or East St. Louis, Illinois, or Dimona, Israel. Sometimes their releases are from the far fringes of well-known musical melting pots like Chicago and New York. Always they’re immaculately packaged and tell an interesting story of how these songs (usually at least decent songs, depending on one’s personal taste) were created, forgotten, and ultimately resurrected.
The stories are fairly uniform. There’s always some combination of poor funding, poor marketing, poor timing, some degree of self-defeating Axl Rose-esque megalomania, complete lack of business acumen, and/or complete lack of commercial viability in terms of the artists’ creative vision. Picture reasons for a small business to fail, and you have the basic story. It’s rags to rags to rags. Told lovingly within each Numero Group release.
But what about the songs?
They’re good. Sometimes they’re merely decent. Pretty much always the songs suffer from a variety apparent fatal flaws. Usually there’s something to it that shows why it’s been forgotten. Maybe it’s a weird flute too high in the mix, or a series of offkey notes, or a terribly written, not-at-all catchy hook, or the fact that a particular track outstays its welcome after 20 seconds but goes on for six minutes, or is a clear ripoff of a Jimi Hendrix riff, or has a ramshackle quality that I with my highly developed and somewhat irony-laden post-Velvet Underground ear for chaos appreciate now more than any local Midwest R&B DJ could be expected to in 1972, or it’s an elaborately written tune about a weirdly specific subject, or it’s by a group whose name accidentally endorses genocide, or maybe it’s just a straight-ahead, repetitive, and/or wandering mediocre pop song from its era without any particular payoff. Sometimes, depending on the consistency of the release, the only apparent fatal flaw in one of the songs is that there were recorded in Belize City, Belize in the early 70’s, and the recording is just too obscure to have found an audience wider than that particular seasonal flood-dominated British colonial market and the few émigrés from it who were lucky enough to find themselves in New York City with enough disposable income to buy an LP.
I have developed a love/hate relationship with the Numero Group over these releases.
On the one hand, I appreciate all the work and I admire their stick-to-it-iveness and taste. Much in the same way I admire the one guy with the self-trimmed beard at the used record store who’s laughing about this one thing Question Mark said to him at a wedding last year. This admiration is a mixture of, “Thank God for genuine eccentrics like you, who, in their natural habitat, have occasion to make everybody else’s life more interesting by relating anecdotes about obscure garage band leaders who genuinely believe they’re from another planet,” and, wistfully, “There but for the grace of God go I.” It’s kind of the same admiration us barely sane types have for people that are full on over the edge crazy and somehow still making it work.
Plus, you know, it’s awfully nice of these kind gents to go off into the dustbins of the world and put together these excruciatingly well-documented re-releases of this charmingly flawed music from the nowhere regions of popular music’s consciousness. Especially since nobody asked them to, and they’re really under no compunction to share their results with the rest of us. But, you know, nobody asked them to. They’d have done it regardless. They’re weird like that. And God bless them for it.
On the other hand, the releases themselves, and the music that’s on them, rely a little too heavily on this context. It’s “look at this thing we found, aren’t we clever,” or more specifically, “you should check this out, it’s a soul band that formed out of this weird collective on the South Side that was part brothel and part cult, and they all wore these funny hats, and they only made five copies of this ever, and the other two that still exist are unplayable.” And you’re like “that’s cool, I guess,” and you try to get away from the dude, and he’s like “but wait, it’s really good, listen,” and you’re like, “ok,” but you look at your watch, and then he plays it and he’s freaking out about how great it is but to you it sounds like five people moaning in a basement with a shitty drummer, because it’s five people moaning in a basement with a shitty drummer, and really the only reason anybody would like it is it’s weird and cute, like, “nice try, you moaning basement cult whores.” And “nice try” is either ironic or whimsical or totally honest, but it’s still there.
You kind of want to get out of there, because the whole thing makes you uncomfortable. First it’s offputting that somebody could be so obsessive about something to ignore all social cues that tell them to keep it to themselves. Then there’s the whole bragging about obscurity thing. Then there’s the whole “flattery of gained trust” thing where you’re supposed to feel grateful that he’s playing this thing for you because he thinks you’ll appreciate it as much as he does. Then there’s this whole sad image of the cult whores moaning in a basement 30 years ago, coupled with the perverse enjoyment this guy’s getting out of playing it for you now. And then there’s your complicity. Because, admit it, you were curious.
It’s like the queasy alliance between exhibitionists and voyeurs. Kind of. You’d think it’d be a match made in heaven, until you realize that the exhibitionist has the virgin/whore fantasy of making regular people into voyeurs due to the undeniably alluring nature of what they’re exhibiting (or else, on the opposite end of the spectrum, they just want to freak everybody out), and it’s a bit of a downer when the person’s just really into the process of being a voyeur in a way that has nothing to do with what you’re exhibiting. It makes the exhibitor a little less special. Same with the voyeur, who wants to discover something he’s not supposed to on his own. Both are perverts, but when they meet both are going, “Ugh, I can’t quite get off to this because you’re clearly getting off to this and that’s grossing me out.”
Well that’s essentially the interaction you’re signing up for every time you spend money on a Numero Group release. Even if the music’s unbelievably great, and it is sometimes but more often isn’t, there’s still a twinge of “Ugh, you’re really getting off to this.”
Left out in the cold are those moaning cult whores in the basement. They’re just the medium, not the message of this exhibitionist/voyeur transaction. No matter how well-researched or well-compensated they might be for their contributions, which is a matter open for some debate (but not a particularly interesting one).
So why am I even bothering to write about this? Cultural imperialism is a pretty well-documented phenomenon, and so is crusty weird dudes who like obscure records. Where do I fit in?
Well, I’m kind of an aspirational eccentric. I’m not fully crazy about all this stuff. At least that’s what I tell myself. So I kind of pretend to be by telling people things like “listening to music is a hobby of mine.” It’s just music. I know that. And I’m going to die one day, whether I have a promo copy of The Beau Brummel’s out-of-print “Bradley’s Barn” album or not. I don’t know what in the hell I expect ownership of such an artifact is supposed to do for me. Elevate me into some more righteously boastful class of music fanatics? It’s a nice record. Really nice. I like listening to it. I think that’s all I’m supposed to get out of it. But it’s hard to fight the urge of entitlement that comes with owning something slightly rare like that. I have to admit, I get a kick out of it. And in the case of this copy of “Bradley’s Barn,” it’s not a vicarious kick, like the Numero Group releases are. I found a copy of it. I bought a copy of it. It’s not a reissue that some opportunistic label put out. It’s an old realdeal copy of the record that opportunistic me suckered myself into purchasing from a store that opportunistically bought it from probably like a dude or something.
But who gives a shit?
Right. Who gives a shit. Other than me, I expect maybe there are some self-trimmed beardwearers out there who’d be moderately impressed. My record collection is slowly filling out. And I’m doing it for my inner music freak. I guess. I don’t know. I can’t imagine anybody who would admit to giving a shit about who-has-what is a person who’s priorities are in proper order. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking obscure pop music or wooden yachts.
That’s why I’ve got a bee so far in my bonnet about these Numero Group guys. Through their devotion to a highly specialized and arguably noble labor of love, they’re making me feel like a real grade-A asshole. They point out what I don’t like about myself. I don’t even care that I don’t like the music they put out all that much. I mean, I like it all well enough, but I rarely love a whole release of theirs from start to finish. It’s usually 2-5 tracks per release. Sometimes I enjoy as few as zero. Rarely it’s all but a couple.
But I can’t stop myself. That’s the problem. I recently talked myself into the conundrum of media, and about how mp3’s are the regenerative next great singles medium, where every track is torn asunder from its intended sequencing and judged on its own merits alone. I said “well, maybe I should just be downloading the ones I like and not bother with the whole package. Except they don’t let you do that because they’re geniuses. There has to be another solution. I keep getting stuff with all this obscure-for-good-reason chaff they keep shoveling out. It’s a lot of effort and money in exchange for a couple of fantastic tracks per release. I feel like I, the music fan, am being taken for a ride, which is a tradition as old as recorded music.
I should say that of the few tracks off of each Numero Group release that I do like, I really really really like them. This is how I get with music. I find one thing that I like, a song, a moment in a song, and then I delve so deeply into it I can’t get out for months. It’s a lot like a chemical dependency, except I’m talking about obscure XTC deep tracks instead of a coke binge. Just so you know that all of this quandary-over-the-delivery medium crap isn’t always in my head, or that I’m not getting anything out of this music. Quite the contrary. I love it enough to care about it. Hence the love/hate relationship with these fuckers.
Certain Numero Group standouts are so fantastic as to almost make up for the whole plunge into self-doubt over why I’m sometimes neurotic, antisocial, and fetishistic about music. For a little while there listening to my favorites of the collection, whether they’re dramatic psychedelic soul flourishes under a child’s crying over his lost mama, or a gospel group’s drummer going totally apeshit over Jesus, it’s almost to forget the whole sordid process by which these songs came to my ear, not to mention everything else that’s bugging me that day. And that’s why I can’t stop, because that’s the feeling all music fans are listening for.
The problem is loving the good stuff that much makes me feel entitled to my disappointment in the stuff that doesn’t measure up. It’s a real lesson in involvement. So I talked myself into the mp3 format internal discussion. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t enjoying the full backlog of lesser Numero tracks I have. Maybe they just don’t work as well filtered into a shuffling iPod as they might on a turntable, where their esoteric nature is more vital. Is what I was telling myself. So I bought a vinyl subscription to their 2009 releases for a hundred dollars. Of course I did.
I’m holding out hope that this won’t be a totally awful decision. One of the things about mp3’s is they’re so easily compilable. They add up exponentially, until you have more music than you could possibly really listen to, and then the whole goal becomes having the music rather than just listening to it. Vinyl is a step further in that direction because of the elaborate and immediately physical processes involved in playing an LP. It’s almost ritualistic. So I’m getting more and more chronic, I guess. Maybe that’s a good thing. I do have that part of me that wants to be a chronic weirdo who used to roadie for Sonic Youth and who won’t shut up about some Phillipino pop girl group he’s somewhat creepily really into these days. I guess that dude is having his way with me recently.
Part of my problem is I have a rickety belief system ruled more or less by a rigidly constructed belief system imposed by that inner weirdo. One total foolhearty belief is: you can read but not listen before you buy. The idea here is that if I know what I’m talking about (I want to believe I do, but I don’t), I will purchase great music sight unseen based on what I’ve heard and what my suspicions are. It’s a total drag a lot of the time because I’m constantly wrong, but when I get something good, I feel like it’s all based on my intuitive beardedguy smarts, and it’s rewarding on both a “hey this is really great” level and a “aren’t I so smart” level. This is only possible for somebody with endless patience for music. I listen to a lot of mediocre bullshit. A LOT. And I’m prone to exaggerating the rewards. So I guess I can’t really blame the Numero guys for taking me for a little ride every once in a while. I’ll take myself on the same ride whether they’re involved or not, and it’s not like they asked me to go along with them.
I guess that’s what I mean when I say “listening to music is a hobby of mine.” Nobody has that as a hobby. Music’s on, you listen to it. That’s called normal human being. No, I guess my hobby, shameful as it is to admit, is having music to the degree that I get to pretend that I’m a part of it. The plain, painful truth is: for somebody who considers listening to music a hobby, I really don’t listen to music all that much more than anybody else. I just work a little harder to get it.
Fine and dandy. I’m a fetishist, I guess. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I honestly though I was past this. But it looks like I’ve got kryptonite, and kryptonite, thy name is Numero Group. I wish I could quit you.
p.s. If you’re still reading, I’m shocked. Just totally shocked. I promise a real Guide about non-nerd things tomorrow.
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